Skip to main content

Planck - Brandon R. Brown ***

Max Planck, the physicist who started the quantum revolution, is a fascinating character, poised as he was between nineteenth century science and the transformation wrought by relativity and quantum theory in the twentieth century. In this new biography of Planck, physicist Brandon Brown provides genuine insights into Planck, the man.

This isn't primarily the standard form of a scientific biography. The book does, of course, mention Planck's science, but it doesn't focus on giving us an in-depth understanding of entropy, blackbody radiation and the emergence of the quantum. What we have here is a study of Planck as a human being, family man and conflicted nationalist who found the Nazi Party, with whom he reluctantly collaborated in, for instance, the removal of Jewish scientists from German academia, uncomfortable and unsophisticated bedfellows.

What the book does well - better than any other book on Planck that I have read - is fill in the detail of his family life, both the positive, loving side and the disasters that saw Planck lose his first wife and all four of the children they had together, from eldest son dying in the First World War to his favourite Erwin, killed by the Nazis for possible involvement in a plot to assassinate Hitler. We see a loving family, at odds with Planck's old-fashioned stiffness in public affairs. And Brown does not hold back from some of the oddity of that family life - the way, for instance, his son-in-law married one of Planck's daughters, then married her twin when the first daughter died (only for the twin to die too). Or what might now raise an eyebrow or two when Planck married his wife's niece soon after his first wife died.

However there are some issues with the approach. The science isn't particularly well explained, not helped by a tendency to overuse florid similes. Planck's letter to Hitler, trying to prevent his son's execution, for instance, is described as being 'like a pick to the mountainside, his best shot to halt a steep slide.' Although the writing style is mostly light and approachable (sometime a little too colloquial, such as in the irritating habit of using 'passed' instead of 'died') the readability of the book is reduced by the jumpiness of the timeline. The first three chapters focus on 1944, 1905 and 1943 respectively. As Brown continues, each chapter then tends to start in 1944, gradually heading towards Erwin, the son's execution, but then in the body of the chapter jumps around all over the place chronologically.

I understand the urge to avoid writing a biography steadily along the timeline, as this can seem a little dull. But this attempt goes too far the other way with far too much flashing back, forwards and for all I know sideways. It's bad enough in any biography, but where there's science involved such a fluid chronology makes it harder to follow the development of the scientific content. The approach just didn't work for me.

Overall, certainly very interesting on Planck as a character. I think his role in Nazi physics is best captured by putting it alongside others as we see in Philip Ball's Serving the Reich, though Brown does an excellent job of bringing out the inner struggle between Planck's powerful love of the Fatherland and the difficulties he had with what was happening around him and to Jewish friends like Einstein. However, I can't rate the book any higher for the reasons mentioned above.


Hardback 

Kindle 
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin Five Way Interview

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin (born in 1999) is a distinguished composer, concert pianist, music theorist and researcher. Three of his piano CDs have been released in Germany. He started his undergraduate degree at the age of 13 in Kazakhstan, and having completed three musical doctorates in prominent Italian music institutions at the age of 20, he has mastered advanced composition techniques. In 2024 he completed a PhD in music at the University of St Andrews / Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (researching timbre-texture co-ordinate in avant- garde music), and was awarded The Silver Medal of The Worshipful Company of Musicians, London. He has held visiting affiliations at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and UCL, and has been lecturing and giving talks internationally since the age of 13. His latest book is Quantum Mechanics and Avant Garde Music . What links quantum physics and avant-garde music? The entire book is devoted to this question. To put it briefly, there are many different link...

Should we question science?

I was surprised recently by something Simon Singh put on X about Sabine Hossenfelder. I have huge admiration for Simon, but I also have a lot of respect for Sabine. She has written two excellent books and has been helpful to me with a number of physics queries - she also had a really interesting blog, and has now become particularly successful with her science videos. This is where I'm afraid she lost me as audience, as I find video a very unsatisfactory medium to take in information - but I know it has mass appeal. This meant I was concerned by Simon's tweet (or whatever we are supposed to call posts on X) saying 'The Problem With Sabine Hossenfelder: if you are a fan of SH... then this is worth watching.' He was referencing a video from 'Professor Dave Explains' - I'm not familiar with Professor Dave (aka Dave Farina, who apparently isn't a professor, which is perhaps a bit unfortunate for someone calling out fakes), but his videos are popular and he...

Everything is Predictable - Tom Chivers *****

There's a stereotype of computer users: Mac users are creative and cool, while PC users are businesslike and unimaginative. Less well-known is that the world of statistics has an equivalent division. Bayesians are the Mac users of the stats world, where frequentists are the PC people. This book sets out to show why Bayesians are not just cool, but also mostly right. Tom Chivers does an excellent job of giving us some historical background, then dives into two key aspects of the use of statistics. These are in science, where the standard approach is frequentist and Bayes only creeps into a few specific applications, such as the accuracy of medical tests, and in decision theory where Bayes is dominant. If this all sounds very dry and unexciting, it's quite the reverse. I admit, I love probability and statistics, and I am something of a closet Bayesian*), but Chivers' light and entertaining style means that what could have been the mathematical equivalent of debating angels on...