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Max Planck As Editor of the Annalen Der Physik

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Max Planck As Editor of the Annalen Der Physik Ann. Phys. (Berlin) 17, No. 5, 273 – 301 (2008) / DOI 10.1002/andp.200810294 Historical Review “… you can’t say to anyone to their face: your paper is rubbish.” Max Planck as Editor of the Annalen der Physik Dieter Hoffmann∗ Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Boltzmannstr. 22, 14195 Berlin, Germany Received 23 January 2008 Published online 23 April 2008 Key words Max Planck, Wilhelm Wien, Annalen der Physik, edition of scientific journals, modern physics, German Physical Society. PACS 01.65.+g In honour of Max Planck (1858–1947) on the occasion of his 150th birthday Max Planck’s place in the history of the Annalen der Physik, which spans some two hundred years, can be characterized as unique. Planck not only published the majority of his own scientific papers in this periodical but was also connected to it personally in various editorial positions. Thus for over half a century, from 1894 until 1947, he contributed decisively toward its promotion as a leading international professional journal of modern physics. This paper documents Planck’s diverse relationships with the Annalen der Physik and analyzes his editorship against the backdrop of the evolving physics in the first quarter of the 20th century. © 2008 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim 1 Annalen der Physik In the summer of 1790 Carl Gren, professor of physics, chemistry and pharmacology at the University of Halle, founded the “Journal der Physik”. From 1795 it appeared under the name Neues Journal der Physik and finally, after Gren’s death in 1798, as the Annalen der Physik. It numbered among the first professional journals in science, nevertheless it lacked the international aura and repute enjoyed by such sister periodicals as the Annales de Chimie et Physique (founded 1789) or the Philosophical Magazine (founded 1798) originating at just about the same time. Germany was still a developing nation in the field of the natural and technical sciences, which were being defined and developed by the discoveries and inventions of British and French scientists and engineers. The intellectual metropolises of the world were Paris and London; and the language of physics and the sciences in general at the turn of the 18th to the 19th centuries was French. English dominated in the areas of technology and engineering. The task Gren’s Journal took on, and that its successor editors William Gilbert (1799–1824) and Johann Christian Poggendorff (1824–1877) continued to pursue, was to convey to the German scientific community the latest scientific findings by means of translations of original papers or reviews. Original papers by German authors were also accepted, of course, not least as reprints from series issued by the important academies, which had hitherto – before the founding of the first professional journals at the close of the 18th century – provided and vouched for the transmission of research results. Book reviews and notices rounded off the picture. ∗ E-mail: [email protected] © 2008 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim 274 D. Hoffmann: Max Planck as Editor of the Annalen der Physik Fig. 1 Max Planck as student, 1878. © Archive of the MPG Berlin. A century later the situation had changed fundamentally. Germany was vying with Britain and France not only politically for power in Europe and took the lead in many fields of science and technology. In physics in particular, considerable progress was made during the final third of the 19th century by German or German-speaking scholars including Ludwig Boltzmann, Hermann von Helmholtz, Friedrich Kohlrausch and Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen. The Annalen der Physik (und Chemie), under the editorship of Gustav Wiedemann since the death of Poggendorff in 1878, became the leading professional journal in physics in this time. Original papers now made up the majority of its articles and their topics were increasingly at the forefront of physical research of the day [1,2]. These changes are also mirrored in Max Planck’s life story and his editorship of the Annalen. 2 Max Planck’s biography [3] Planck was born on April 23, 1858 in Kiel. His father Johann Julius Wilhelm had been working at the local university as professor of law since 1850. In 1867 he was appointed to the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. So the young Planck mainly grew up in the Bavarian metropolis. He also gained most of his early intellectual impressions from there, although his family tradition had a strong Prussian streak. In 1874 he had just turned 16 when he passed his school leaving examinations and took up studies in physics at the University of Munich. In 1877 he left for Berlin for two semesters. Since Bismarck’s unification of the © 2008 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim www.ann-phys.org Ann. Phys. (Berlin) 17, No. 5 (2008) 275 Reich, the city was not just the capital of the German empire but was gaining increasing fame at home and abroad as a centre for science and culture. The University of Berlin advanced to the top institution of instruction and research. With the appointment of Hermann Helmholtz and Gustav Kirchhoff in the field of physics, an epoch began in which “the general history of physics became most intimately linked with the history of Berlin physics.” [4] Although the lectures by these two famous physicists were rather a disappointment for Planck, the high level at which science was being cultivated by them and in Berlin general would have a lasting influence on the course his life was to take. But first he took his doctorate in the spring of 1879 at the University of Munich, defending a thesis on the second law of heat theory. He earned his Habilitation degree already in the following year analyzing the equilibrium states of isotropic bodies at different temperatures [5]. This work became Planck’s future focus of research: thermodynamics, or more specifically, the 2nd law of thermodynamics and the concept of entropy [6]. In the years that followed he systematically examined the consequences of the 2nd law and the significance of the concept of entropy for thermodynamic equilibria in physico-chemical systems. His related publications from the 1880s treated, among other things, the thermodynamic theory of melting, evaporation and sublimation, the determination of the function of entropy for numerous systems in physical chemistry as well as the thermodynamic explanation of thermal phenomena. The most important and discerning findings of this early period concerned the theory of dilute solutions. Planck was able to specify the laws governing a drop in freezing point and a rise in boiling point and determine the chemical equilibrium in such solutions. Throughout his life Planck never entirely left the field of thermodynamics. In 1920 he succeeded in finding the ultimate thermodynamic formulation for Nernst’s heat theorem and in 1934 he gave the Braun-Le Chatelier principle – the principle of least resistance – its final form. Another achievement deserving mention is theFokker-Planck equation found in 1917, a formula of centralimportance in statistical physics. Planck’s early papers on thermodynamics very quickly attracted the attention and applause of the profes- sional world. Thus after a five-year period as unsalaried private lecturer at Munich, he was able to accept an appointment as extraordinary professor of theoretical physics at the university of his home town Kiel, for the summer term of 1885. Merely four years later he became Gustav Kirchhoff’s successor as director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Berlin. Thus he invested not just one of the most respected professorships in physics in Germany but one of the few chairs devoted exclusively to theory. Planck’s professional activities – extending beyond his retirement in 1927 – wrought lifelong ties to Berlin. His character and scientific competence contributed decisively toward establishing theoretical physics as an independent subdiscipline of physics. These personal gifts also prepared the way to a blossoming of the field in Berlin and, after Helmholtz’s death in 1894, were brought to bear on the local development of physics overall, particularly on science policy and institutionalization. At Berlin Planck also addressed a new field of research beginning in the middle of the 1890s, the theory of heat radiation. Setting out from the contemporary advances and the general establishment of Maxwell’s electrodynamics, he attempted to connect his thermodynamic studies with the electromagnetic theory of light. His main concern was finding a consistent interpretation of radiation as an electromagnetic process by recourse to thermodynamics. In his inaugural address before the Prussian Academy of Science in the summer of 1894, Planck said in this regard: “It is likewise to be hoped that we may gain closer insight into electrodynamic processes that are directly determined by temperature, such as are expressed in thermal radiation, without first having to take the arduous detour through the mechanistic interpretation of electricity.” [7] 3 Planck and the theory of heat radiation The theory of heat radiation was one of the newest and most demanding fields of physics of the time. Little was known, for example, about the laws governing the emission by a hot object of heat or light rays. Moreover, it became evident that the related problems were unusually difficult and complex, both from www.ann-phys.org © 2008 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim 276 D. Hoffmann: Max Planck as Editor of the Annalen der Physik the theoretical point of view as well as with regard to the experiments. One of the leading laboratories to examine the problem of heat radiation was the German bureau of standards, the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt (PTR). Founded in 1887 it was the country’s largest and most important institution of physics and was located in Charlottenburg, at that time still a separate city from Berlin.
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