Max Planck: Whatever Happens in Life, Never Walk the Plank!

 There are bad days, bad years and then there is Max Planck.

Whenever life seems determined to put the boot in, it is worth remembering one of the greatest physicists who ever lived, because Planck managed to combine one of the most triumphant scientific careers in history with a private life that reads like the Book of Job rewritten by a particularly vindictive German dramatist.

Planck was the man who helped blow classical physics apart. In 1900, trying to solve the apparently technical problem of black-body radiation, he introduced the idea that energy came in discrete packets, or quanta. He did not initially set out to overthrow physics. Like many revolutionaries, he would probably have preferred the old order to work. But the constant that now bears his name, Planck's constant, became one of the foundations of quantum theory, and his work eventually earned him the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics.

So far, so good. If the universe had possessed any sense of proportion, it might have allowed the founder of quantum theory a peaceful domestic life in compensation for having made reality considerably stranger for everybody else.

It did not. Planck married Marie Merck in 1887 and appears to have been deeply attached to his family. Their Berlin home was not some austere scientist's bunker. Planck loved music, played the piano, entertained colleagues and friends, went hiking and mountain climbing and regarded family life as the place where he could relax from the severe discipline of scientific work. Albert Einstein was among those with whom he played chamber music. By all accounts, the domestic world mattered enormously to him.

Then it began disappearing. Marie died in 1909. Planck remarried two years later, but the deaths kept coming. His eldest son Karl joined the German army and was killed in 1916 during the First World War. Planck's twin daughters, Grete and Emma, then died in almost grotesquely similar circumstances. Grete died giving birth in 1917. Emma helped care for the surviving baby, later married Grete's widower, and in 1919 also died in childbirth. Within a decade Planck had lost his first wife, a son and both daughters.

There are people who would regard one of those events as the defining tragedy of a lifetime. Planck received them almost as a sequence. Yet he continued working.

That part interests me more than the familiar heroic story about the birth of quantum mechanics. Planck was not insulated from grief by some Vulcan scientific temperament. Contemporary accounts describe him as a strongly emotional family man. There is no reason to think these losses bounced harmlessly from the shell of a great intellect. They hurt precisely because the people involved mattered so much.

Nevertheless, he kept getting out of bed. Then Germany itself collapsed around him. Planck was already an elderly man when the Nazis came to power. His relationship with the regime was complicated and has understandably been debated ever since. He was not a political revolutionary. He tried to preserve German scientific institutions, sometimes through compromises that look uncomfortable in retrospect, while also intervening on behalf of threatened Jewish scientists and openly honouring his expelled colleague Fritz Haber. He eventually resigned from the Prussian Academy after its Nazification.

By then Planck had survived an imperial Germany, a world war, revolution, hyperinflation, the Weimar Republic and the arrival of Hitler. The universe apparently decided that this was insufficient.

In February 1944 an Allied air raid completely destroyed his house in Berlin-Grunewald. His library went with it, together with irreplaceable scientific records, diaries and correspondence. Imagine being 85 years old, having spent more than half a century building a scientific and intellectual life, and watching much of its physical record disappear in a bombing raid.

Even that was not the final blow. Planck's surviving son from his first marriage, Erwin, had become involved with the conservative German resistance associated with the July 20, 1944 attempt to overthrow Hitler. He was arrested, brought before the notorious People's Court and sentenced to death. Max Planck, by then one of the most celebrated scientists alive, appealed desperately for his son's life. His reputation could not save him.

Erwin Planck was hanged at Plötzensee prison on January 23, 1945. Planck was 86.

Afterward he wrote to the physicist Arnold Sommerfeld that his grief could not be expressed in words and that he was struggling to find the strength to make what remained of his life meaningful through conscientious work. That sentence probably tells us more about Planck than another page explaining the quantum of action.

He continued. He lived long enough to see Nazi Germany destroyed. In 1945 he again served as acting president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. The following year he travelled to London as the only German scientist invited to the Royal Society's Newton celebrations. He died in Göttingen in October 1947, aged 89. The organisation that succeeded the Kaiser Wilhelm Society subsequently took his name: the Max Planck Society.

Calling him the "unluckiest scientist in history" is obviously not something that can be objectively measured. Plenty of scientists were murdered, imprisoned, tortured, impoverished or destroyed by events beyond their control. Ludwig Boltzmann killed himself. Alan Turing was criminally prosecuted and chemically castrated. Lise Meitner fled Nazi Germany and watched others receive much of the glory for work to which she had made a crucial contribution. Scientists caught in Stalin's Soviet Union sometimes discovered that getting the equations wrong was less dangerous than getting the politics wrong.

But Planck belongs in any discussion of the cruellest private biographies attached to a great scientific name because his misfortunes were not one catastrophe. They accumulated over decades.

His wife died. His son was killed in war. One daughter died giving birth. Her twin replaced her within the shattered family and then also died giving birth. His country descended into dictatorship and another world war. His home and papers were bombed into ash. Then his remaining beloved son was executed by his own government. Yet Planck did not turn his suffering into a philosophy of surrender.

That is why I sometimes think about him when comparatively minor disasters begin piling up. The exercise is not intended to deny one's own troubles. Pain does not disappear merely because someone else suffered more. But perspective remains one of the few psychological medicines available without prescription.

A car dies. Money runs short. Something breaks at the worst possible moment. Bureaucracy performs its usual miracle of transforming a simple problem into six forms and a committee. One is entitled to swear.

Then think of Planck. At 85 he stood without the home and records accumulated over a scientific lifetime. At 86 he could not save his son from the hangman. And somehow the old physicist kept working, travelling and rebuilding what remained of German science.

There is perhaps an unintended philosophical lesson in the man who discovered that nature comes in quanta. Misfortune often arrives in quanta too. One packet is manageable. Then comes another, and another, until what looked like a continuous ordinary life suddenly has an entirely different energy level. Planck endured the transitions.

So when times are tough, I invoke the Planck principle: things could be worse, they have been worse for considerably greater men than me, and the correct response is usually to get on with the day's work.

But there is one lesson from his life that should be obeyed literally:

Whatever happens, never walk the Planck/plank!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walking_the_plank