Max Planck Quotes

“You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being. Aristotle was an encyclopedic polymath, an all time intellect. Yet not only can you know more than him about the world. You also can have a deeper understanding of how everything works. Such is the privilege of living after Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick and their colleagues.

I'm not saying you're more intelligent than Aristotle, or wiser. For all I know, Aristotle's the cleverest person who ever lived. That's not the point. The point is only that science is cumulative, and we live later.”
― Richard Dawkins

“In the temple of science are many mansions, and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them thither. Many take to science out of a joyful sense of superior intellectual power; science is their own special sport to which they look for vivid experience and the satisfaction of ambition; many others are to be found in the temple who have offered the products of their brains on this altar for purely utilitarian purposes. Were [someone to] drive all the people belonging to these two categories out of the temple, the assemblage would be seriously depleted, but there would still be some men, of both present and past times, left inside. Our Planck is one of them, and that is why we love him.”
― Albert Einstein

“The longing to behold this pre-established harmony [of phenomena and theoretical principles] is the source of the inexhaustible patience and perseverance with which Planck has devoted himself ... The state of mind which enables a man to do work of this kind is akin to that of the religious worshiper or the lover; the daily effort comes from no deliberate intention or program, but straight from the heart.”
― Albert Einstein

“In this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few unimportant holes.

{Advising his student, Max Planck, whom he advised in 1878, not to go into physics, at at the University of Munich}”
― Philipp von Jolly

“We have no right to assume that any physical laws exist, or if they have existed up until now, that they will continue to exist in a similar manner in the future.”
― Max Planck

“On the other side, Church spokesmen could scarcely become enthusiastic about Planck's deism, which omitted all reference to established religions and had no more doctrinal content than Einstein's Judaism.”
― J.L. Heilbron, Dilemmas of an Upright Man: Max Planck and the Fortunes of German Science

“After the discovery of spectral analysis no one trained in physics could doubt the problem of the atom would be solved when physicists had learned to understand the language of spectra. So manifold was the enormous amount of material that has been accumulated in sixty years of spectroscopic research that it seemed at first beyond the possibility of disentanglement. An almost greater enlightenment has resulted from the seven years of Röntgen spectroscopy, inasmuch as it has attacked the problem of the atom at its very root, and illuminates the interior. What we are nowadays hearing of the language of spectra is a true 'music of the spheres' in order and harmony that becomes ever more perfect in spite of the manifold variety. The theory of spectral lines will bear the name of Bohr for all time. But yet another name will be permanently associated with it, that of Planck. All integral laws of spectral lines and of atomic theory spring originally from the quantum theory. It is the mysterious organon on which Nature plays her music of the spectra, and according to the rhythm of which she regulates the structure of the atoms and nuclei.”
― Arnold Sommerfeld, Atombau und Spektrallinien.

“For modern cosmology God cannot be a working hypothesis because God is not given to us in the observable nature of things. The poetic and theological idea that the universe is an expression of God's creative power is false. And yet the possibility that underlying the nature of things is an undiscoverable force of unimaginable simplicity that one may call God haunts and frustrates modern science. If this principle exists, then it cannot be different from our experience of it: it must be inherent, not transcendent; purely natural, therefore, not a violation of its own being, and hence intelligent, in the sense it requires coherence rather than chaos and confusion to exist at all--as the ancient myths tell us; impersonal to the extent that we cannot attribute moral purposes or even will, classically understood, to what we can observe of its operations. It is entirely coextensive and if it has a limit coterminous with what is--a perception that dates in theology from Anselm to Tillich and in natural philosophy from Democritus to Planck. It does not exist in gaps of undiscovered data or models or as an unsolved mystery but in the givenness of the world and the intelligent life form that has arisen to ponder it.”
― R. Joseph Hoffmann

“If the gravitational field is space, according to Einstein, then this field is the generator of Everything. What makes the gravitational field or space function is motion or the original, primordial “vibration” (Max Planck’s term). Without the original vibration, there would be no motion and no gravitational field. Without motion, there would be no gravitation, no gravitational field, no space, and no curvature of space.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, ABSOLUTE

“Gravitational pull is the Max Plank’s vibration, which, as a source of motion, is the source of the gravitational pull, without which kinetic and potential energy would be zero. At this point, everything stops. At the speed of light, an object has infinite kinetic energy, which equals infinite mass. This infinite kinetic energy or infinite mass is static and massless. That is the point of absolute density. The world becomes static when its mass reaches the point of absolute speed, which would be equivalent to the same infinite point reached by the mass traveling at the speed of light. This is not infinite mass but an effect of the kinetic energy produced by the speed of light equal to the infinite mass. This proves my point that everything would stop if it were not for the kinetic energy and the “gravitational” pull fed by the immaterial Universal Source of everything.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, ABSOLUTE