Max Planck
Max Planck
Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck, FRSwas a German theoretical physicist whose work on quantum theory won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth23 April 1858
CityKiel, Germany
CountryGermany
Max Planck quotes about
convincing eventually familiar generation grows opponents rather science scientific triumph truth
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
art cutting taught-us
Modern physics has taught us that the nature of any system cannot be discovered by dividing it into its component parts and studying each part by itself... We must keep our attention fixed on the whole and on the interconnection between the parts. The same is true of our intellectual life. 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.
errors progress generations
Science progresses not by convincing the adherents of old theories that they are wrong, but by allowing enough time to pass so that a new generation can arise unencumbered by the old errors.
nature body temperature
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.
law realms causation
Religion belongs to the realm that is inviolable before the law of causation and therefore closed to science.
science troops shock
Experimenters are the shock troops of science.
knowledge mean intuition
Science does not mean an idle resting upon a body of certain knowledge; it means unresting endeavor and continually progressing development toward an end which the poetic intuition may apprehend, but which the intellect can never fully grasp.
intelligent curves light
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.
funeral economics
Science advances funeral by funeral
success guarantees betrayed
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.
mean imagination experiments
Experiment is the only means of knowledge at our disposal. Everything else is poetry, imagination.
firsts belief conviction
The highest court is in the end one's own conscience and conviction-that goes for you and for Einstein and every other physicist-and before any science there is first of all belief. For me, it is belief in a complete lawfulness in everything that happens.