Max Planck (1858-1947)

Famous for: Formulation of the quantum theory

He is a German theoretical physicist who is credited with the birth of quantum theory, which won him the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1918. This theory revolutionized our understanding of atomic and subatomic processes.

Planck’s earliest work was on the subject of thermodynamics, an interest he acquired from his studies under Kirchhoff, whom he greatly admired, and very considerably from reading R. Clausius’ publications. He published papers on entropy, on thermoelectricity and the theory of dilute solutions. In his later work on radiation processes, he was able to deduce the relationship between the energy and the frequency of radiation. In his 1900 paper, he announced that the energy emitted by a resonator could only take on discrete values or quanta. The energy for a resonator of frequency ν is hν where h is a universal constant, now called Planck’s constant.