Max Planck

Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck, ForMemRS was a German physicist who is regarded as the founder of the quantum theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918.

At the end of the 1920s Bohr, Heisenberg and Pauli had worked out the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, but it was rejected by Planck, as well as Schrodinger, Laue, and Einstein. Planck expected that wave mechanics would soon render quantum theory "his own child" unnecessary. This was not to be the case, however. Further work only cemented quantum theory, even against his and Einstein's philosophical revulsions. Planck experienced the truth of his own earlier observation from his struggle with the older views in his younger years: "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."