Max Planck

Max Planck did not want to start a revolution. He was a Prussian conservative who came to physics seeking permanence, drawn not by the hope of upheaval but by the promise of order. In 1900, unable to reconcile the spectrum of black-body radiation with classical equations, he introduced a desperate patch: energy must be emitted not continuously but in discrete packets he called quanta. He spent the following decade trying to walk it back, and failed—because he was too rigorous to lie about the curve. The act of intellectual honesty performed by a man who would have preferred any other outcome became the emergent seed of quantum physics and won him the 1918 Nobel Prize. His maxim that science advances one funeral at a time is not merely a quip; it is a precise structural claim about how disruptive truths propagate through institutions populated by people whose professional identities are bound to the framework being replaced. [YOU]