Scientist vs. Scientist #5 - Max Planck and Erwin Schrodinger

Episode number 5 of Scientist vs. Scientist. In this episode, we will discuss Max Planck and Erwin Schrödinger. First, we will discuss Max Planck. Max Planck was born in Kiel, Germany on April 23, 1858, to Johann Julius Wilhelm Planck and Emma Patzig. The Planck family was an intellectual family, as Max Planck's grandfather and great-grandfather Planck's father was a law professor at the University of Kiel. Max Planck was the sixth child in his father's family and the fourth child of Johann Planck and Emma Patzig. As a child, Planck was very musically gifted and played piano, cello, and the organ. The family tradition of excellence in education also became embedded in his mind at a young age, and when Planck entered the Maximilian Gymnasium at the age of nine, he excelled in all subjects taught there. While at the gymnasium, Planck was taught astronomy, mechanics, and mathematics by Hermann Mueller, a famous mathematician of the time. When Planck graduated at the age of 17, he faced a difficult decision between choosing physics as his career or choosing either music or philology. Hermann Mueller suggested that Planck should go into the field of physics, and Planck followed his advice. However, he still enjoyed music in his free time, and music did not lose importance in his mind. In 1874, Planck entered the University of Munich. At the University of Munich, Planck talked to physics professor Philipp von Jolly, who advised him against going into the field of physics, as most of the field had already been discovered. Planck was not deterred, and instead responded that he wanted to understand the known fundamentals of the field as opposed to discovering new things. Under Philipp von Jolly's guidance, Planck investigated the diffusion of hydrogen through heated platinum, the only experiments of his scientific career. In 1877, Max Planck visited the University of Berlin and attended lectures by Hermann von Helmholtz and Gustav Kirchhoff. He found that Hermann von Helmholtz prepared his lectures poorly, and Gustav Kirchhoff's lectures were monotonous and uninteresting. While at the University of Berlin, Planck studied the writings of Rudolf Clausius, which led him to choose thermodynamics as his field of study. In 1878, Planck passed his qualifying exams and defended his dissertation in February of 1879. For a short time, he taught mathematics at the Maximilian Gymnasium and returned to Munich to present his habilitation thesis on thermodynamics in 1880. After he completed his habilitation thesis, he travelled to Munich and became a private teacher, all the while continuing his work on heat theory. He hoped to attain a job as a physics teacher and decided to wait until a position was available. In 1885, the University of Kiel hired Planck as an associate professor of theoretical physics, where he worked for several years. While there, he continued his work on thermodynamics, particularly how thermodynamics applied to physical chemistry. In March of 1887, Planck married Marie Merck and had four children, Karl, Emma, Grete, and Erwin, from 1888 to 1893. Marie Planck later died in 1909, possibly because of tuberculosis. In 1889, after the death of Gustav Kirchhoff, Planck filled Kirchhoff's position and eventually was promoted to the position of full professor. While working at the University of Berlin, Planck became a friend of Helmholtz and began to value him greatly as a mentor and colleague. Planck also merged the local physical societies in 1898 and taught theoretical physics to several students there. Planck's attention had turned to blackbody radiation in 1894, especially the relationship between the intensity of radiation emitted by a blackbody and the frequency of radiation and temperature of the body. Many scientists before had worked on the problem to no avail, such as Wilhelm Wein or John Strutt and James Johns. The first of Planck's attempts did not succeed at solving the problem either, and only on his second try did Planck manage to derive a working description. Drawing on the ideas of Ludwig Boltzmann, Planck's idea suggested that electromagnetic energy could only be emitted in packets, called quanta, and that the energy of a photon emitted was determined by multiplying Planck's constant, denoted with the letter H, by the frequency of the radiation, denoted by the Greek letter nu. From there, Planck reasoned that the energy of the entire packet was the number of photons in that packet, multiplied by the energy of the photons. Planck's equation, now called the Planck postulate, is now considered the dawn of quantum physics and allowed Planck to derive more units used in modern quantum physics. For his postulate, Planck received the Nobel Prize in 1918. Planck continued work on blackbody radiation for several more years, attempting to integrate his postulate into classical mechanics, which proved to be impossible. When Einstein published his three papers on the famous theory of relativity in 1905, Planck immediately realized the importance of Einstein's work and helped to bring the papers to the attention of more scientists. Planck also organized the first Solvay conference to discuss the many phenomena in Einstein's papers that seemingly contradicted classical physics. Einstein and Planck became close friends, and Planck appointed Einstein a professor at the University of Berlin, where Planck had been appointed as dean. At the beginning of the First World War in Europe, Planck supported the war, saying that it was a smooth solution to difficult domestic problems. He also signed the Manifesto of the 93 Intellectuals, a German propaganda document. However, towards the later years of the war, he reconsidered his support. After the war, Planck created an organization aimed at funding German scientific research due to the collapsed economy World War I had left Germany with. Hardly 15 years had passed since the end of World War I, when the Nazi party rose to power in Germany in 1933. Due to Hitler's hate of the Jewish people, most Jewish scientists lost their jobs and were forced to emigrate from Germany. Max Planck attempted to discuss the issue with Hitler, but did not succeed. Planck did, however, help Jewish scientists work in institutes of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society until his term as president of the society ended in 1936. In 1938, the Prussian Academy of Sciences, which Planck was president of, was taken over by the Nazis, leading to Planck's resignation. Planck continued to give talks all over Europe, and Planck and his family moved out of their house in Berlin due to the frequent air raids of the city. In 1944, Planck's home was destroyed by an air raid, and at the end of the war, Planck's family moved to a relative in Göttingen. Max Planck died on the 4th of October, 1947, in Göttingen, Germany, at the age of 89. For his contributions to science, Planck received the Nobel Prize, the Copley Medal, and the Max Planck Medal, named after himself. Planck's greatest contribution to science was the Planck Postulate, and Planck is now regarded as the father of quantum physics. Now we will talk about Erwin Schrödinger. Erwin Schrödinger was born in Vienna, in what is now Austria, on August 12th, 1887, to Rudolf Schrödinger and Georgine Brande. Erwin was the only child in the family, and although his parents were religious, Schrödinger considered himself atheist. Despite his atheism, he employed religious symbolism in his work, both early on in childhood and later on in life. As a child, Schrödinger received much of his education from tutors, only attending a public school for a couple of weeks. He considered his father an influential figure in his life, almost like a teacher, and often talked to him about many things. In 1898, Schrödinger entered the academic gymnasium in Vienna, where his teachers focused on teaching Latin and Greek, and neglected the sciences. Although Schrödinger was an excellent student in the subjects, he disliked having to memorize facts and dates, and preferred math and physics. While in Vienna, Schrödinger became an avid admirer of theater, often visiting the local theater when he was not busy with schoolwork. In 1907, he also started attending physics lectures, and met Frederick Heysenerl, whose lectures he attended five times a week. He also attended math lectures, which, along with the physics lectures, would change his life. From 1906 to 1910, Schrödinger studied under Franz Exner and Frederick Heysenerl, and eventually attained his doctorate in 1910 under Heysenerl. Until the outbreak of World War I, Schrödinger remained at the university, serving as an assistant to Franz Exner. He presented his habilitation thesis and attained habilitation in 1914, and then went to fight in World War I. Working as an officer in fortress artillery, he often had free time, during which he studied physics. Before the end of the war, Schrödinger had wanted to become a professor at the University of Czernowitz, but the collapse of Austria-Hungary prevented him from doing so, and he was forced to take a job at the University of Vienna again. Until 1919, he continued to work on classical experimental physics. In 1920, he married Anna-Marie Bertel and moved to Jena, Germany, where in a few months he would become a professor at the University of Zurich. In Zurich, Schrödinger worked on the theory of heat, reaction kinetics, and thermodynamics of lattice vibrations. He published several papers on quantum physics, but did not devote most of his time to the field. He also worked on light and colors, and related quantum orbits of electrons to geometric properties, some of his lesser-known works. In 1924, Louise Broglie defended his dissertation on the theory of quanta, which the famous physicist Albert Einstein immediately recognized as important and worked on a derivation of the topic. Schrödinger, also realizing the importance of Broglie's work, worked to recast Einstein's work on quantum gas theory without the use of Bose statistics, which he thought were unsatisfactory. In December of 1925, he succeeded in his work, remaking Einstein's work into simply the mechanics of waves applied to the gas. He published his results in a famous physics journal, the first appearance of his famous wave equation. In a second paper, Schrödinger showed how to make the change from geometrical optics to wave optics. In total, Schrödinger published four papers on the subject, the second of which introduced the Schrödinger equation, and all of which resolved many previous questions raised by other scientists. The papers are considered his greatest contribution to physics, and Schrödinger has often been called the father of quantum mechanics for his contributions of those papers. Schrödinger continued work on this branch of quantum mechanics for a year after the papers, further developing the field. In 1927, Schrödinger moved to Berlin to take over the position of Max Planck as the chair of theoretical physics at the University of Berlin. Although Schrödinger hated living in crowded cities, he enjoyed his years in Berlin, which was for him a very beautiful teaching and learning period. As the Nazi regime began to gain power in 1933, Schrödinger found more and more scientists vacating their jobs due to the Nazis' antisemitism. He decided to flee the country to Oxford, England, where he would not face harassment from the fascist party. In Oxford, Schrödinger became a fellow of Magdalen College at the University of Oxford, and found out that he had received the Nobel Prize for Physics along with Paul Dirac. He left Oxford University to teach at Princeton University, denying an offer for a permanent position. While in England, Schrödinger proposed his famous cat thought experiment, a creative thought experiment that said if a cat is trapped in a box with a vial of poison and a Geiger counter that breaks the vial, after a period of time, the cat is both alive and dead, introducing the idea of entanglement. His homesickness eventually got the better of him, and he returned to Vienna to teach at the University of Graz. Back in Austria after the Nazi Anschluss, Schrödinger was pressured to leave his position, and in 1938, was dismissed without warning. Despite warnings from the Nazi party not to leave the country, Schrödinger fled with his family to Italy, visiting England again for possible positions at universities. The Irish Prime Minister at the time then invited Schrödinger to Dublin to help establish an institute for advanced studies. Schrödinger moved to Dublin and became the director of the School for Theoretical Physics in 1940. He continued work on quantum mechanics and general relativity, and wrote about cosmology and the application of physics to biology. In 1955, Schrödinger retired, and in 1956, he returned to Vienna, where he was honored with the Prize of the City of Vienna and awarded by the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Erwin Schrödinger died on the 4th of January, 1961, in Vienna, Austria, at the age of 73. For his contributions to science, Schrödinger received the Nobel Prize, the Matteucci Medal, and the Max Planck Medal. Schrödinger's greatest contribution to science was the Schrödinger equation, and Schrödinger is now regarded as the father of quantum mechanics. Both of these scientists contributed greatly to mankind's knowledge of physics, and have created the building blocks of quantum physics. As per their contributions, the result is a tie, although you are always free to decide on your own opinion. Thank you for watching, and as always, if you enjoyed, leave a like or a favorite, share the video with your friends, or even subscribe for more educational videos. Check out some of the other videos in the Scientists vs. Scientists playlist, or check out the featured channels for more cool content.