Planck Quotes

New scientific ideas never spring from a communal body, however organized, but rather from the head of an individually inspired researcher who struggles with his problems in lonely thought and unites all his thought on one single point which is his whole world for the moment. ~ Max Planck

Planck noted that although the Andromedans wouldn't have access to our rulers, scales, or clocks, they would have access to our physical laws, which are the same as theirs. They could measure, in particular, three universal constants:

c: The speed of light.

G: Newton's gravitational constant. In Newton's theory, this is a measure of the strength of gravity. To be precise, in Newton's law of gravity, the gravitational force between the bodies of masses m1, m2 separated by distance r is Gm1m2/r^2.

h: Planck's constant. ~ Frank Wilczek

Experiment is the only means of knowledge at our disposal. Everything else is poetry, imagination. ~ Max Planck

We are in a position similar to that of a mountaineer who is wandering over uncharted spaces, and never knows whether behind the peak which he sees in front of him and which he tries to scale there may not be another peak still beyond and higher up. ~ Max Planck

Science advances one funeral at a time. ~ Max Planck

It was not by accident that the greatest thinkers of all ages were deeply religious souls. ~ Max Planck

There is no matter as such - mind is the matrix of all matter. ~ Max Planck

In all my research I have never come across matter. To me the term matter implies a bundle of energy which is given form by an intelligent spirit. ~ Max Planck

Whence come I and whither go I? That is the great unfathomable question, the same for every one of us. Science has no answer to it. ~ Max Planck

The whole strenuous intellectual work of an industrious research worker would appear, after all, in vain and hopeless, if he were not occasionally through some striking facts to find that he had, at the end of all his criss-cross journeys, at last accomplished at least one step which was conclusively nearer the truth. ~ Max Planck

A scientist is happy, not in resting on his attainments but in the steady acquisition of fresh knowledge. ~ Max Planck

The bigger question now becomes, "so what? Who cares?" You will never have an infinite number of balls and you will never have a large enough urn to hold all of them. You will never build a lamp that can turn on and off arbitrarily fast. We cannot investigate time or space past a certain smallness, except when pretending, so what are supertasks, but recreational fictions, entertaining riddles? We can ask more questions than we can answer, so what?

Well, here's what. Neanderthals. Neanderthals and humans, us, Homo sapiens, lived together in Europe for at least five thousand years. Neanderthals were strong and clever, they may have even intentionally buried their dead, but for hundreds of thousands of years, Neanderthals barely went anywhere. They pretty much just explored and spread until they reached water or some other obstacle and then stopped. Homo sapiens, on the other hand, didn't do that. They did things that make no sense crossing terrain and water without knowing what lay ahead. Svante Pääbo has worked on the Neanderthal genome at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and he points out that technology alone didn't allow humans to go to Madagascar, to Australia. Neanderthals built boats too. Instead, he says, there's "some madness there. How many people must have sailed out and vanished on the Pacific before you found Easter Island? I mean, it's ridiculous. And why do you do that? Is it for the glory? For immortality? For curiosity? And now ~ Michael Stevens From VSauce

The Theory of Relativity confers an absolute meaning on a magnitude which in classical theory has only a relative significance: the velocity of light. The velocity of light is to the Theory of Relativity as the elementary quantum of action is to the Quantum Theory: it is its absolute core. ~ Max Planck

A new scientific truth is usually not propagated in such a way that opponents become convinced and discard their previous views. No, the adversaries eventually die off, and the upcoming generation is familiarised anew with the truth. ~ Max Planck

The world of the rayons is the quasi non-physical world. It is the birth place of quanta - the worlds of the fermions and the bosons. ~ Amit Ray

if an atom were magnified to be as large as the observable universe, the same magnification would make the Planck length the size of an average tree. ~ Brian Greene

A new truth always has to conend with many difficulties. If it were not so, it would have been discovered much sooner. ~ Max Planck

Indeed, as string theory was understood better, it became clear that the gauge interactions naturally emerged from it. But even more than this, during their period of exile from the mainstream, the string theorists realized that their theory naturally gave rise to an interaction that had all of the hallmarks of the gravitational force. In order to get the force to come out with the right strength, all they had to do was fix the length of the string to be about the Planck length. Thus, string theory had the potential to unify all of physics in a simple framework, in which all phenomena arise from the motion and vibrations of fundamental one-dimensional strings. ~ Lee Smolin

Experimenters are the shock troops of science. ~ Max Planck

Lying there, I thought of my own culture, of the assembly of books in the library at Alexandria; of the deliberations of Darwin and Mendel in their respective gardens; of the architectural conception of the cathedral at Chartres; of Bach's cello suites, the philosophy of Schweitzer, the insights of Planck and Dirac. Have we come all this way, I wondered, only to be dismantled by our own technologies, to be betrayed by political connivance or the impersonal avarice of a corporation? ~ Barry Lopez

I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness. ~ Max Planck

As an Englishman, permit me now to say with what pleasure I learnt of the election of Professor Planck and Professor Stark to the Nobel Prizes for the years 1918 and 1919. ~ Charles Glover Barkla

Both religion and natural science require a belief in God for their activities, to the former He is the starting point, and to the latter the goal of every thought process. To the former He is the foundation, to the latter, the crown of the edifice of every generalized world view. ~ Max Planck

It is impossible to make a clear cut between science, religion, and art. The whole is never equal simply to the sum of its various parts. ~ Max Planck

The worth of a new idea is invariably determined, not by the degree of its intuitiveness-which incidentally, is to a major extent a matter of experience and habit-but by the scope and accuracy of the individual laws to the discovery of which it eventually leads. ~ Max Planck

Max Planck, surveying his own career in his Scientific Autobiography, sadly remarked that "a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."8 ~ Thomas S. Kuhn

Thus, the photons which constitute a ray of light behave like intelligent human beings: out of all possible curves they always select the one which will take them most quickly to their goal. ~ Max Planck

Planck ... and Bohr ... have invented systems containing electrons of which the motion produces no effect upon external charges ... [N]ot only [is this] inconsistent with the accepted laws of electromagnetism, but I may add, is logically objectionable, for that state of motion which produces no physical effect whatsoever may better be called a state of rest. ~ G.N.Lewis

I incline to the quantum mechanical view in this matter. My theory is that your cat is not lost, but that his waveform has temporarily collapsed and must be restored. Schrödinger. Planck. And so on." -- Dirk Gently ~ Douglas Adams

Science ... means unresting endeavor and continually progressing development toward an aim which the poetic intuition may apprehend, but the intellect can never fully grasp. ~ Max Planck

121.George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces
122.Max Planck – Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory; Where Is Science Going?; Scientific Autobiography
123.Henri Bergson – Time and Free Will; Matter and Memory; Creative Evolution; The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
124.John Dewey – How We Think; Democracy and Education; Experience and Nature; Logic; the Theory of Inquiry
125.Alfred North Whitehead – An Introduction to Mathematics; Science and the Modern World; The Aims of Education and Other Essays; Adventures of Ideas
126.George Santayana – The Life of Reason; Skepticism and Animal Faith; Persons and Places
127.Vladimir Lenin – The State and Revo ~ Mortimer J. Adler

Scientific work will never stop, and it would be terrible if it did. If there were no more problems, you would put your hands in your pockets and your head on a pillow and would work no more. In science rest is stagnation, rest is death. ~ Max Planck

The goal is nothing other than the coherence and completeness of the system not only in respect of all details, but also in respect of all physicists of all places, all times, all peoples, and all cultures. ~ Max Planck

Chris hurried after him. 'It's so hard to believe we just travelled hundreds of light years.'
'Why?' asked the Doctor.
'I always understood that you cannot travel faster than light,' said Chris.
'Says who?'
'Says Einstein,' said Chris.
'What?' The Doctor stopped and put an arm around Chris's shoulder. 'Do you understand Einstein?'
Chris wasn't sure where this was going. 'Yes.'
'What?' gasped the Doctor. 'And quantum theory?'
'Yes,' said Chris. He basked in the Doctor's astonishment, on firmer ground at last.
'What?' gasped the Doctor. 'And Planck?'
'Yes,' said Chris.
'What?' gasped the Doctor. 'And Newton?'
'Yes!' said Chris.
'What?' gasped the Doctor. 'And Schoenberg?'
Chris paused. Was it a trick question? He recalled reading about the crisis of tonality. He thought he'd caught most of it, so he answered proudly, 'Yes. Of course.'
The Doctor whistled, apparently impressed. Then he said, 'You've got an awful lot to unlearn, Bristol. ~ Gareth Roberts

Before an experiment can be performed, it must be planned - the question to nature must be formulated before being posed. Before the result of a measurement can be used, it must be interpreted - nature's answer must be understood properly. These two tasks are those of the theorist, who finds himself always more and more dependent on the tools of abstract mathematics. Of course, this does not mean that the experimenter does not also engage in theoretical deliberations. The foremost classical example of a major achievement produced by such a division of labor is the creation of spectrum analysis by the joint efforts of Robert Bunsen, the experimenter, and Gustav Kirchhoff, the theorist. Since then, spectrum analysis has been continually developing and bearing ever richer fruit. ~ Max Planck

You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being ... Such is the privilege of living after Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick and their colleagues. ~ Richard Dawkins

No burden is so heavy for a man to bear as a succession of happy days. ~ Max Planck

I think more like a quantum
Buddhist, in that there is a universal proto-conscious mind which we
access, and can influence us. But it actually exists at the
funda-mental level of the universe, at the Planck scale. ~ Stuart Hameroff

After earning my Ph.D., I stayed at the Max-Planck Institute as a postdoc, working on laser excitation of Rydberg states of triatomic hydrogen and helium hydride. I also succeeded in analyzing all the emission spectra of helium hydride, which I had discovered during my Ph.D. ~ Wolfgang Ketterle

People complain that our generation has no philosophers. They are wrong. They now sit in another faculty. Their names are Max Planck and Albert Einstein. Upon appointment as the first president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, Berlin, formed for the advancement of science. ~ Adolf Von Harnack

Expressed in Planck units, the temperature T of a black hole is inversely proportional to its mass, m. This is a third law, Hawking's law: T = k/m. The constant k is very small in normal units. As a result, astrophysical black holes have temperatures of a very small fractionnof a degree. ~ Lee Smolin

An indispensable hypothesis, even though still far from being a guarantee of success, is however the pursuit of a specific aim, whose lighted beacon, even by initial failures, is not betrayed. ~ Max Planck

Farsighted theologians are now working to mine the eternal metal from the teachings of Jesus and to forge it for all time. ~ Max Planck

Ego is the immediate dictate of human consciousness. ~ Max Planck

An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature and a measurement is the recording of Nature's answer. ~ Max Planck

To make a discovery is not necessarily the same as to understand a discovery. Not only Planck but also other physicists were intially at a loss as to what the proper context of the new postulate really was. ~ Abraham Pais

Many prominent scientists - including Darwin, Einstein, and Planck - have considered the concept of God very seriously. What are your thoughts on the concept of God and on the existence of God? ~ Christian B. Anfinsen

Halyard yawned, and was annoyed to think that Lynn, who had just read "order out of chaos" as "order out of koze," made three times as much money as he did. Lynn, or, as Halyard preferred to think of him, Planck, hadn't even finished high school, and Halyard had known smarter Irish setters. Yet, here the son-of-a-bitch was, elected to more than a hundred thousand bucks a year! ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Science enhances the moral value of life, because it furthers a love of truth and reverence - love of truth displaying itself in the constant endeavor to arrive at a more exact knowledge of the world of mind and matter around us, and reverence, because every advance in knowledge brings us face to face with the mystery of our own being. ~ Max Planck

Max Planck once remarked, Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of Nature. And it is because in the last analysis we ourselves are part of the mystery we are trying to solve. ~ Michio Kaku

It is never possible to predict a physical occurrence with unlimited precision. ~ Max Planck

Religion belongs to the realm that is inviolable before the law of causation and therefore closed to science. ~ Max Planck

Those [scientists] who dislike entertaining contradictory thoughts are unlikely to enrich their science with new ideas. ~ Max Planck

Years after Planck's death in 1947, at the age of 89, his former student and colleague James Franck recalled watching his hopeless struggle 'to avoid quantum theory, whether he could not at least make the influence of quantum theory as little as it could possibly be'.It was clear to Franck that Planck 'was a revolutionary against his own will' who 'finally came to the conclusion, "It doesn't help. We have to live with quantum theory. And believe me, it will expand."' It was a fitting epitaph for a reluctant revolutionary. ~ Manjit Kumar

When I began my physical studies [in Munich in 1874] and sought advice from my venerable teacher Philipp von Jolly ... he portrayed to me physics as a highly developed, almost fully matured science ... Possibly in one or another nook there would perhaps be a dust particle or a small bubble to be examined and classified, but the system as a whole stood there fairly secured, and theoretical physics approached visibly that degree of perfection which, for example, geometry has had already for centuries. ~ Max Planck

This phenomenon suggests nineteenth-century German polymath Adolf Bastian's theory of Elementargedanke, literally "elementary thoughts of humankind," which so influenced physicists like Planck, Pauli, and Einstein, indeed many of those in the German school of physics, which was dominant in the early decades of the twentieth century leading up to World War II, as well as anthropologists like Franz Boas (the father of American anthropology) and physicians such as Jung. The idea of the collective unconscious (Jung's term for the nonlocal domain) was in the way he expressed it. It proposes a worldview in which all manifestations of consciousness, regardless of the complexity of their physical forms, are part of a network of life. A network in which each component both informs and influences as it is informed and influenced. It ~ Stephan A. Schwartz

You sometimes hear people say, with a certain pride in their clerical resistance to the myth, that the nineteenth century really ended not in 1900 but in 1914. But there are different ways of measuring an epoch. 1914 has obvious qualifications; but if you wanted to defend the neater, more mythical date, you could do very well. In 1900 Nietzsche died; Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams; 1900 was the date of Husserl Logic, and of Russell's Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz. With an exquisite sense of timing Planck published his quantum hypothesis in the very last days of the century, December 1900. Thus, within a few months, were published works which transformed or transvalued spirituality, the relation of language to knowing, and the very locus of human uncertainty, henceforth to be thought of not as an imperfection of the human apparatus but part of the nature of things, a condition of what we may know. 1900, like 1400 and 1600 and 1000, has the look of a year that ends a saeculum. The mood of fin de siècle is confronted by a harsh historical finis saeculi. There is something satisfying about it, some confirmation of the rightness of the patterns we impose. But as Focillon observed, the anxiety reflected by the fin de siècle is perpetual, and people don't wait for centuries to end before they express it. Any date can be justified on some calculation or other.

And of course we have it now, the sense of an ending. It has not diminished, and ~ Frank Kermode

When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. ~ Max Planck

The man who cannot occasionally imagine events and conditions of existence that are contrary to the causal principle as he knows it will never enrich his science by the addition of a new idea. ~ Max Planck

Stephen Hawking showed mathematically that the entropy of a black hole equals the number of Planck-sized cells that it takes to cover its event horizon. It's as if each cell carries one bit, one basic unit of information. ~ Brian Greene

Truth never triumphs-its opponents just die out, ~ Max Planck

Physical changes take place continuously, while chemical changes take place discontinuously. Physics deals chiefly with continuous varying quantities, while chemistry deals chiefly with whole numbers. ~ Max Planck

The founders and grand theorists of modern (quantum and relativity) physics: Einstein, Schroedinger, Heisenberg, Bohr, Eddington, Pauli, de Broglie, Jeans, and Planck. ~ Ken Wilber

What seems today inconceivable will appear one day, from a higher stand point, quite simple and harmonious. ~ Max Planck

The physicist Max Planck famously said that science advances one funeral at a time. He meant that only when one generation passes away do new theories have a chance to root out old ones. This is true not only of science. Think for a moment about your own workplace. No matter whether you are a scholar, journalist, cook or football player, how would you feel if your boss were 120, his ideas were formulated when Victoria was still queen, and he was likely to stay your boss for a couple of decades more? ~ Yuval Noah Harari

Of course, physics prevents us from dividing things beyond a certain limit, determined by what is called the Planck constant. This is because, according to physicists, it is actually impossible to measure a distance smaller than 10-34m without creating a black hole that would swallow up the measuring device. ~ Marcus Du Sautoy

Nature prefers the more probable states to the less probable because in nature processes take place in the direction of greater probability. Heat goes from a body at higher temperature to a body at lower temperature because the state of equal temperature distribution is more probable than a state of unequal temperature distribution. ~ Max Planck

We cannot rest and sit down lest we rust and decay. Health is maintained only through work. And as it is with all life so it is with science. We are always struggling from the relative to the absolute. ~ Max Planck

[I do not believe] in a personal God, let alone a Christian God. ~ Max Planck

The power of the deductive network produced in physics has been illustrated in a delightful article by Victor F. Weisskopf. He begins by taking the magnitudes of six physical constants known by measurement: the mass of the proton, the mass and electric charge of the electron, the light velocity, Newton's gravitational constant, and the quantum of action of Planck.

He adds three of four fundamental laws (e.g., de Broglie's relations connecting particle momentum and particle energy with the wavelength and frequency, and the Pauli exclusion principle), and shows that one can then derive a host of different, apparently quite unconnected, facts that happen to be known to us by observation separately .... ~ Gerald Holton

Religion and natural science are fighting a joint battle in an incessant, never relaxing crusade against skepticism and against dogmatism, against unbelief and superstition ... [and therefore] 'On to God! ~ Max Planck

The spectral density of black body radiation ... represents something absolute, and since the search for the absolutes has always appeared to me to be the highest form of research, I applied myself vigorously to its solution. ~ Max Planck

Scientific discovery and scientific knowledge have been achieved only by those who have gone in pursuit of it without any practical purpose whatsoever in view. ~ Max Planck

There is a real world independent of our senses; the laws of nature were not invented by man, but forced on him by the natural world. They are the expression of a natural world order. ~ Max Planck

Two observations take us across the finish line. The Second Law ensures that entropy increases throughout the entire process, and so the information hidden within the hard drives, Kindles, old-fashioned paper books, and everything else you packed into the region is less than that hidden in the black hole. From the results of Bekenstein and Hawking, we know that the black hole's hidden information content is given by the area of its event horizon. Moreover, because you were careful not to overspill the original region of space, the black hole's event horizon coincides with the region's boundary, so the black hole's entropy equals the area of this surrounding surface. We thus learn an important lesson. The amount of information contained within a region of space, stored in any objects of any design, is always less than the area of the surface that surrounds the region (measured in square Planck units). ~ Brian Greene

The entire world we apprehend through our senses is no more than a tiny fragment in the vastness of Nature. ~ Max Planck

Hitherto the principle of causality was universally accepted as an indispensable postulate of scientific research, but now we are told by some physicists that it must be thrown overboard. The fact that such an extraordinary opinion should be expressed in responsible scientific quarters is widely taken to be significant of the all-round unreliability of human knowledge. This indeed is a very serious situation. ~ Max Planck