Planck's Quotes

#1. 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

#2. conformed to the principle of least action, a foundation of physics that holds that light or any object moving between two points should follow the easiest path.3 Planck's paper not only contributed to the development of relativity theory; it also helped to legitimize it among other physicists.

Walter Isaacson

#3. The fine structure constant is undoubtedly the most fundamental pure (dimensionless) number in all of physics. It relates the basic constants of electromagnetism (the charge of the electron), relativity (the speed of light), and quantum mechanics (Planck's constant).

David J. Griffiths

#4. Fine Structure Constant: Fundamental numerical constant of atomic physics and quantum electrodynamics, defined as the square of the charge of the electron divided by the product of Planck's constant and the speed of light.

Steven Weinberg

#5. We are in a position similar to that of a mountaineer who is wandering over uncharted spaces, and never knows whether behind the peak which he sees in front of him and which he tries to scale there may not be another peak still beyond and higher up.

Max Planck

#6. Max Planck once remarked, Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of Nature. And it is because in the last analysis we ourselves are part of the mystery we are trying to solve.

Michio Kaku

#7. 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.

Max Planck

#8. The spectral density of black body radiation ... represents something absolute, and since the search for the absolutes has always appeared to me to be the highest form of research, I applied myself vigorously to its solution.

Max Planck

#9. 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.

Max Planck

#10. The man who cannot occasionally imagine events and conditions of existence that are contrary to the causal principle as he knows it will never enrich his science by the addition of a new idea.

Max Planck

#11. We cannot rest and sit down lest we rust and decay. Health is maintained only through work. And as it is with all life so it is with science. We are always struggling from the relative to the absolute.

Max Planck

#12. Religion belongs to the realm that is inviolable before the law of causation and therefore closed to science.

Max Planck

#13. Science advances funeral by funeral

Max Planck

#14. Scientific work will never stop, and it would be terrible if it did. If there were no more problems, you would put your hands in your pockets and your head on a pillow and would work no more. In science rest is stagnation, rest is death.

Max Planck

#15. This is one of man's oldest riddles. How can the independence of human volition be harmonized with the fact that we are integral parts of a universe which is subject to the rigid order of nature's laws?

Max Planck

#16. 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.

Max Planck

#17. You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being ... Such is the privilege of living after Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick and their colleagues.

Richard Dawkins

#18. Max Planck, surveying his own career in his Scientific Autobiography, sadly remarked that "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."8

Thomas S. Kuhn

#19. We have no right to assume that any physical laws exist, or if they have existed up to now, that they will continue to exist in a similar manner in the future.

Max Planck

#20. When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.

Max Planck

#21. Ego is the immediate dictate of human consciousness.

Max Planck

#22. Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: 'Ye must have faith.'

Max Planck

#23. Physical changes take place continuously, while chemical changes take place discontinuously. Physics deals chiefly with continuous varying quantities, while chemistry deals chiefly with whole numbers.

Max Planck

#24. Planck length and Planck time had always looked a bit too much like pixel dimensions for comfort.

Peter Watts

#25. Truth never triumphs-its opponents just die out,

Max Planck

#26. People complain that our generation has no philosophers. They are wrong. They now sit in another faculty. Their names are Max Planck and Albert Einstein. Upon appointment as the first president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, Berlin, formed for the advancement of science.

Adolf Von Harnack

#27. There can never be any real opposition between religion and science; for the one is the complement of the other.

Max Planck

#28. The founders and grand theorists of modern (quantum and relativity) physics: Einstein, Schroedinger, Heisenberg, Bohr, Eddington, Pauli, de Broglie, Jeans, and Planck.

Ken Wilber

#29. 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.

Max Planck

#30. The entire world we apprehend through our senses is no more than a tiny fragment in the vastness of Nature.

Max Planck

#31. [I do not believe] in a personal God, let alone a Christian God.

Max Planck

#32. Farsighted theologians are now working to mine the eternal metal from the teachings of Jesus and to forge it for all time.

Max Planck

#33. As the great physicist Max Planck put it, scientists must have a vivid intuitive imagination, for new ideas are not generated by deduction, but by an artistically creative imagination.

Robert Greene

#34. Science ... means unresting endeavor and continually progressing development toward an aim which the poetic intuition may apprehend, but the intellect can never fully grasp.

Max Planck

#35. Science advances one funeral at a time.

Max Planck

#36. An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: What does happen is that the opponents gradually die out.

Max Planck

#37. 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.

Max Planck

#38. To make a discovery is not necessarily the same as to understand a discovery. Not only Planck but also other physicists were intially at a loss as to what the proper context of the new postulate really was.

Abraham Pais

#39. There is a real world independent of our senses; the laws of nature were not invented by man, but forced on him by the natural world. They are the expression of a natural world order.

Max Planck

#40. Religion and natural science are fighting a joint battle in an incessant, never relaxing crusade against skepticism and against dogmatism, against unbelief and superstition ... [and therefore] 'On to God!

Max Planck

#41. It is not the possession of truth, but the success which attends the seeking after it, that enriches the seeker and brings happiness to him.

Max Planck

#42. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together.
We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.

Max Planck

#43. There is no matter as such - mind is the matrix of all matter.

Max Planck

#44. A new truth always has to conend with many difficulties. If it were not so, it would have been discovered much sooner.

Max Planck

#45. New scientific ideas never spring from a communal body, however organized, but rather from the head of an individually inspired researcher who struggles with his problems in lonely thought and unites all his thought on one single point which is his whole world for the moment.

Max Planck

#46. After earning my Ph.D., I stayed at the Max-Planck Institute as a postdoc, working on laser excitation of Rydberg states of triatomic hydrogen and helium hydride. I also succeeded in analyzing all the emission spectra of helium hydride, which I had discovered during my Ph.D.

Wolfgang Ketterle

#47. As an Englishman, permit me now to say with what pleasure I learnt of the election of Professor Planck and Professor Stark to the Nobel Prizes for the years 1918 and 1919.

Charles Glover Barkla

#48. An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature and a measurement is the recording of Nature's answer.

Max Planck

#49. Scientific discovery and scientific knowledge have been achieved only by those who have gone in pursuit of it without any practical purpose whatsoever in view.

Max Planck

#50. Many prominent scientists - including Darwin, Einstein, and Planck - have considered the concept of God very seriously. What are your thoughts on the concept of God and on the existence of God?

Christian B. Anfinsen

#51. I am certain that our Max Planck Institute in Stuttgart will increasingly be an international meeting place open to scientists of all countries.

Klaus Von Klitzing

#52. Expressed in Planck units, the temperature T of a black hole is inversely proportional to its mass, m. This is a third law, Hawking's law: T = k/m. The constant k is very small in normal units. As a result, astrophysical black holes have temperatures of a very small fractionnof a degree.

Lee Smolin

#53. Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.

Max Planck

#54. The assumption of an absolute determinism is the essential foundation of every scientific enquiry.

Max Planck

#55. Many studies of research scientists have shown that achievement (at least below the genius level of an Einstein, Bohr, or a Planck) depends less on ability in doing research than on the courage to go after opportunity.

Peter Drucker

#56. No burden is so heavy for a man to bear as a succession of happy days.

Max Planck

#57. Whence come I and whither go I? That is the great unfathomable question, the same for every one of us. Science has no answer to it.

Max Planck

#58. What seems today inconceivable will appear one day, from a higher stand point, quite simple and harmonious.

Max Planck

#59. A new scientific truth is usually not propagated in such a way that opponents become convinced and discard their previous views. No, the adversaries eventually die off, and the upcoming generation is familiarised anew with the truth.

Max Planck

#60. I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.

Max Planck

#61. Those [scientists] who dislike entertaining contradictory thoughts are unlikely to enrich their science with new ideas.

Max Planck

#62. The worth of a new idea is invariably determined, not by the degree of its intuitiveness-which incidentally, is to a major extent a matter of experience and habit-but by the scope and accuracy of the individual laws to the discovery of which it eventually leads.

Max Planck

#63. The Planck satellite may detect the imprint of the gravitational waves predicted by inflation. This would be quantum gravity written across the sky.

Stephen Hawking

#64. Experimenters are the shock troops of science.

Max Planck

#65. It is never possible to predict a physical occurrence with unlimited precision.

Max Planck

#66. As physicist Max Planck once observed, "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die.

Adam M. Grant

#67. The Theory of Relativity confers an absolute meaning on a magnitude which in classical theory has only a relative significance: the velocity of light. The velocity of light is to the Theory of Relativity as the elementary quantum of action is to the Quantum Theory: it is its absolute core.

Max Planck

#68. It was not by accident that the greatest thinkers of all ages were deeply religious souls.

Max Planck

#69. Both religion and natural science require a belief in God for their activities, to the former He is the starting point, and to the latter the goal of every thought process. To the former He is the foundation, to the latter, the crown of the edifice of every generalized world view.

Max Planck

#70. I think more like a quantum
Buddhist, in that there is a universal proto-conscious mind which we
access, and can influence us. But it actually exists at the
funda-mental level of the universe, at the Planck scale.

Stuart Hameroff

#71. A scientist is happy, not in resting on his attainments but in the steady acquisition of fresh knowledge.

Max Planck

#72. Experiment is the only means of knowledge at our disposal. Everything else is poetry, imagination.

Max Planck

#73. 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.

Max Planck

#74. In all my research I have never come across matter. To me the term matter implies a bundle of energy which is given form by an intelligent spirit.

Max Planck

#75. I had always looked upon the search for the absolute as the noblest and most worth while task of science.

Max Planck

#76. The goal is nothing other than the coherence and completeness of the system not only in respect of all details, but also in respect of all physicists of all places, all times, all peoples, and all cultures.

Max Planck