Best Planck Quotes & Sayings

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

The power of the deductive network produced in physics has been illustrated in a delightful article by Victor F. Weisskopf. He begins by taking the magnitudes of six physical constants known by measurement: the mass of the proton, the mass and electric charge of the electron, the light velocity, Newton's gravitational constant, and the quantum of action of Planck.

He adds three of four fundamental laws (e.g., de Broglie's relations connecting particle momentum and particle energy with the wavelength and frequency, and the Pauli exclusion principle), and shows that one can then derive a host of different, apparently quite unconnected, facts that happen to be known to us by observation separately .... — Gerald Holton

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

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

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

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

Planck length and Planck time had always looked a bit too much like pixel dimensions for comfort. — Peter Watts

For simple black holes, which do not rotate and have no electric charge, the values of the temperature and entropy can be expressed very simply. The area of the horizon of a simple black hole is proportional to the square of its mass, in Planck units. The entropy S is proportional to this quantity. In terms of Planck units, we have the simple formula S = .25 A / h G. Where A is the area of the horizon, and G is the gravitational constant. — Lee Smolin

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

Even if we choose to use the nonstandard notion of distance and thereby describe the radius as being shorter than the Planck length, the physics we encounter - as discussed in previous sections - will be identical to that of a universe in which the radius, in the conventional sense of distance, is larger than the Planck length — Brian Greene

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

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

Halyard yawned, and was annoyed to think that Lynn, who had just read "order out of chaos" as "order out of koze," made three times as much money as he did. Lynn, or, as Halyard preferred to think of him, Planck, hadn't even finished high school, and Halyard had known smarter Irish setters. Yet, here the son-of-a-bitch was, elected to more than a hundred thousand bucks a year! — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

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

It is a remarkable fact that the second law of thermodynamics has played in the history of science a fundamental role far beyond its original scope. Suffice it to mention Boltzmann's work on kinetic theory, Planck's discovery of quantum theory or Einstein's theory of spontaneous emission, which were all based on the second law of thermodynamics. — Ilya Prigogine