Dr Faustus of Modern Physics - Department of Speech, Music and ...

1.3. PLANCK: FATHER OF MODERN PHYSICS 11
1.3 Planck: Father of Modern Physics
In Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality, Manjit
Kumar concludes the Prologue by the following introduction of Max Planck:
• In the 1890s some of Germany’s leading physicists were obsessively
pursuing a problem that had long vexed them: what was the relationship
between the temperature, the range of colors, and the intensity of light
emitted by a hot iron poker? It seemed a trivial problem compared to the
mystery of X-rays and radioactivity that had physicists rushing to their
laboratories and reaching for their notebooks. But for a nation forged
only in 1871, the quest for the solution to the hot iron poker, or what
became known as the blackbody radiation problem, was intimately bound
up with the need to give the German lighting industry a competitive edge
against its British and American competitors. But try as they might,
Germany’s finest physicists could not solve it. In 1896 they thought they
had, only to find within a few short years that new experimental data
proved that they had not. It was Max Planck who solved the blackbody
problem, at a cost. The price was the quantum.
The essence of the Faustian dilemma is expressed in The Dilemmas of an
Upright Man [7] as follows:
• Planck’s confidence in himself and his ideas increased in step with Prussia’s
triumphs on the battlefield and with the new Reich’s rise to dominance
among European nations. Although personally the mot modest
of men, Planck identifed his own development so fully with Germany’s
that the preservation of its cultural capital was inseparable from the
preservation of personal values and professional life. Over all these
values stood the ideal of unity, which in the political sphere inspired the
creation of the Wilhelmian empire and in the cultural sphere inpired
belief in the interconnectednes of all respectable barnches of learning.
Planck’s pride in imperial Germany and his commitment to the acaddemic
ideal of unity of knowledge were the pillars on which he raised
his science policy