Abstract
IN a broadcast talk on Max Planck, in which whole-hearted tribute was paid to his great work, I used the words, "If I hesitate to put Planck on a level with Newton and Einstein it must be partly on the ground that he did not seem to know quite what he had done when he did it . . . Planck seems to have been reluctant to realize the range of his innovation." I was, of course, basing my opinion upon his published work. I have just received a letter from Frau Planck, his widow, who has read the talk as printed in the Listener of November 6, 1947, p. 811, in which she says, "You have done justice to the scientist and to the man in every respect. I should only like to make one small exception. You think that he did not realize the scope of his discovery. Yet he did do so—though of course not in all its consequences. He said to our son with whom he had gone through a book on Galileo, Newton and Kepler, ‘Look, my boy, I shall one day be in a book like this'. And to our other son he spoke as Sommerfeld has set it down." The reference is to an article of Prof. Sommer-feld‘s (Die Neue Zeitung, November 6, 1947), which I have received both from her and from Sommerfeld, where the following passage occurs: "Planck realized the scope of his discovery from the beginning. This is clear from an anecdote which Professor Bavinck, who died recently, repeated to me on the occasion of his lecture at Munich this year : he had it from his friend Erwin Planck, the son of the great man. The father said to the son in 1900, on the occasion of a walk in the Grünewald, ‘Today I have made a discovery which is as important as Newton‘s discovery'."
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ANDRADE, E. Max Planck. Nature 161, 284 (1948). https://doi.org/10.1038/161284a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/161284a0
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