Customer Reviews (1)

M. Planck, a man of science and of universal speculation
My copy is hardback (c) 1932, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York, N.Y.Prologue by Albert Einstein; trans. by James Murphy.
There is more to this book than just raw science, but what there is relates nicely to his speculation upon the grander scale.It qualifies as a science 101 book in my estimation.The author was a profound humanist as well as atheorectical scientist and professor in Germany between the First and Second World Wars.His allusions to religion are Universal rather than specific.I found myself emersed in his dialog relative to my own thinking born of my education in History, and life's experience.I won't say he altered my conclusions but certainly expanded my range of thought to a higher level.Max Planck admits the limits of his profession while at the same time adding considerably both to my vocabulary and comprehension.I recommend readers have a dictionary handy that will permit them better to understand the implications of what he has to say.It is not an easy book to read, but one that serious thinkers should appreciate. ... Read more

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This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishings Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the worlds literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more

Product Description
This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The great classic of macroscopic thermodynamics
Seeing this book still in print makes me think that not all is lost. For decades everyone looked for Planck's treatise in order to give unity to his or her collection of facts concerning heat, as well as depth to the whole thing. The careful and elegant exposition still satisfies these needs, though the main trends have changed. The purity of the macroscopic approach championed by Planck (in fact a competition against Boltzmann) may seem now an exageration. You will not find interpretations in terms of molecules, for instance. On the other hand, the charm of the purely macroscopic approach is undeniable. After the introductory chapters the reader will notice an emphasis towards chemical equilibrium. This is, in fact, common to almost all thermodynamics texts of that time (Sommerfeld's , for instance) and is due to the fact that one of the main scientific efforts of that time was to try to synthesize ammonia, badly needed for agriculture and explosives (wars were much mo! re frequent then). The problem was eventually solved, for gaseous reagents, by Planck's students Guldberg and Waage and, especially, by Nernst, with the discovery of the third law of thermodynamics. This, by the way, receives a very detailed and interesting treatmentin the last chapter, named The Absolute Value of Entropy. This alone would be worth the reading. ... Read more

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Winner of the History of Science Society's Watson Davis Prize for the Public Understanding of Science. In this moving and eloquent portrait, John Heilbron describes how the founder of quantum theory rose to the pinnacle of German science. With great understanding, he shows how Max Planck suffered morally and intellectually as his lifelong habit of service to his country and to physics was confronted by the realities of World War I and the brutalities of the Third Reich. In an afterword written for this edition, he weighs the recurring questions among historians and scientists about the costs to others, and to Planck himself, of the painful choices he faced in attempting to build an "ark" to carry science and scientists through the storms of Nazism. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

Good Reading Book for Young and Old
I purchased this for my grandson who needed to read a book for a high school project related to science and quantum theory.He enjoyed it for the scientific perspective it presented.I was interested particularly in reading about Planck's life in Germany during the war and how he tried to deal with Hitler's regime -- and live. "Dilemna" is an understatement here. Yes, some of the material was superfluous and could be scanned over.However, I did not agree at all with the reviewer who deemed the book to be dry.

An excellent book on a complex subject
Max Planck, with the discovery of Planck's Constant, laid the foundation for Quantum Physics and didn't even realize the broader implications of his discovery at the time.For years, he and his good friend Einstein resisted accepting quantum theory, for they still thought a better explanation would come along, a unified theory which would embrace Newtonian physics while also explaining odd quantum phenomena turning up in the laboratory.When Planck, at first a staunch Newtonian physicist, realized that quantum mechanics, with its statistical analyses and entanglement and uncertainty wasn't going away, he embraced it, and at once became the target of the classical physicists he had left behind.This book skillfully paints a picture of this unfolding drama, including the horrific tragedy of how, in the end, the Nazi movement and WWII doomed the respectability of Planck's beloved German physics research organizations.Planck was also a philosopher of science, writing and lecturing widely on the ethics and philosophy of physics, and the book also describes how Planck's philosophy unfolded over his lifetime.Explains enough quantum mechanics at the lay level to give you the concepts you need to know to understand the history being laid out, without complicating it with the higher mathematics which a lay person would find difficult to follow.An excellent read, well written, and meticulously researched.Definitely recommended.

Not quite what you'd expect, considering how awesome the name "Max Planck" is.
I read this book for the same reason Edmund Hillary climbed Mount Everest - to be the second person ever to have done it.

Okay, crap. The was my best joke this week, and upon the obligatory Wikipediaing I found that the implied slight is factually disputed.

This book was boring. And I don't exactly know why I read it other than it was there - sitting in the library. I knew that it was an academic book somebody was glad to have dumped in the house library after buying it for a class they probably dropped two weeks into the term. But even after I started reading it, I was somehow unable to completely give up on it. It's a weird psychological response I have that I don't want to stop reading any book I've already begun.

I learned a lot of facts reading this book, all of which I promptly forgot due to the serial nature of their presentation. I did get some sort of a feel of the life of Planck, which was also pretty dismal. He just didn't know what to do. Germany was full of seriously bad dudes, and Planck was torn between speaking out to defend the scientists wrongfully persecuted, and trying to stay at the head of German science to protect what he could of the institution. He was the antithesis of Einstein. Never brilliant, but assiduous and respectable. He was tied down to his country and his science. He experienced endless hardships in the deaths of his children in war, execution, and attempted suicide. He was also an excellent pianist, if you're keeping track. This book was depressing on a lot of levels. I read it right before bed because I didn't care if I was too tired to retain anything from it, and besides I wanted strange dreams with German words I don't know and disembodied heads of physicists arguing abstrusely about politics I don't understand.

A bit dry, but very informative.
This book is a reasonable account of the problems that Max Planck faced in trying to disseminate his worldview. The first chapter, Establishing the World Picture, is the shortest and mostly biographical. The second chapter, Defending the World Picture, is about many of his problems and the resistance that he met. In the middle is a photographic section, not useful but still very nice. The last two chapters deal mostly with his problems during the Third Reich and his work during that time. One warning: this book assumes you have an elementary knowledge of theoretical physics. There are no helpful explanations about thermodynamics, black-body radiation, or quantum physics; the most one can hope for is a cursory review of the phenomena involved. This book does help one understand Max Planck the man, the things which caused him to do what he did and his motivating factors. I think the author intended mostly for this book to be read by college-age or graduate students who were already interested in quantum physics and related topics; it's very dry, with little humor and a lot of highly advanced physics topics. At times, it seems a bit disjointed, and since it's not in chronological order by any stretch of the imagination, the dates sprinkled liberally throughout are the only way to keep it straight in your head.That said, it's a good read if you really want to know about Max Planck: not his theories or his work, but his situation and his life.

His life as a education tsar
It is not a biography but rather as the title says, his dilemmas in life and decisions he had to make during his life. I wonder how he found the time to be everywhere for everybody. It starts quickly with quanta idea and that goes into the administrative acts, institutions, academies he established and became a director. His dilemmas during the Nazi regime and his hopes that eventually people will come to right way and considerations that these are transitional times. Meanwhile it looks like he was willing to separate people into groups valuable and worthless, interesting, no wonder Einstein never forgave him. I did not find the book fluent. It was jumping all over with a lot of institution names and dates and persons, sort of broken in pieces. ... Read more

Product Description
This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Planck's Seminal Work - AIP Historical Series
In 1900 Max Planck introduced a quantum constant into his mathematical expression for the energy distribution of blackbody radiation. This act is now considered to mark the beginning of the twentieth century revolution in physics. Planck's contemporaries had difficulty understanding his earliest papers on the quantum concept. In 1906 and 1914 Planck published more comprehensive accounts of his theory of blackbody heat radiation and his quantum hypothesis.

This American Institute of Physics publication, The Theory of Heat Radiation, reprints these two later works - Vorlesungen Uber die Theorie der Warmestrahlung (1906) and his revised and expanded second edition (1914). The 1906 work is in German while the revised 1914 edition is in English. This publication is volume 11 in the outstanding AIP series titled The History of Modern Physics 1800-1950.

I found the lengthy introduction by Allan Needell to be very helpful in placing Planck's work in the proper historical context and in identifying points at which Planck made key changes in his personal views. Much of Needell's introduction is devoted to Planck's gradual acceptance of Boltzmann's probabilistic approach to entropy.

The first fifty pages examine heat radiation from the perspective of classical optics, including topics like radiation at thermodynamic equilibrium, Kirchhoff's law, and blackbody radiation. The next fifty pages, deductions from electrodynamics and thermodynamics, were substantially more mathematical. Planck discussed the Stefan-Boltzmann law of radiation and the Wien displacement law in detail as well as spectral distribution of energy radiation. Section III presents a general procedure for calculating entropy and introduces his quantum hypothesis. I did not study section IV (Planck's derivation of the law of the distribution of energy in the spectrum of blackbody radiation), nor section V (Irreversible Radiation Processes.)

Despite an extended effort on my part, I did not find Planck's systematic examination of heat radiation to be particularly helpful as an aid to mastering thermodynamics. Its appeal is largely historical. Needell rightly observes that Planck's works will primarily benefit those readers who seek to study and understand the history of quantum physics. However, I do believe that general readers with substantial familiarity with thermodynamics and electrodynamics will find it worthwhile to study Allan Needell's thoughtful introduction and to browse Max Planck's seminal work.

For those looking for a more basic self-tutorial, I highly recommend Thermodynamics by Enrico Fermi. Dover Publications has reprinted this remarkably lucid, concise work in an inexpensive soft cover format. This short book is based on a series of lectures given by Fermi at Columbia University in 1936.

I also recommend chapter one, Thermal Radiation and Planck's Postulate, in the widely used text book Quantum Physics of Atoms, Molecules, Solids, Nuclei, and Particles by Robert Eisberg and Robert Resnick.

Essential to understand radiative heat transfer
I recommend this book to anyone involved with radiative heat transfer, even engineers.Usually one makes contact with this subject through engineering-oriented books. But, at least in this case, the original workis much better. Engineers usually don't like to read physics books, butthis one is pretty accessible and easy to understand. ... Read more

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This volume contains a collection of most notable original papers published in the journal 'Annalen der Physik' written by one of its renowned editors, Max Planck. These papers - reedited on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of his birth - deal with topics which later on took a prominent place in the scientific work of this outstanding physicist: the theory of the emission spectrum of black bodies and the central role of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Understanding himself as an all-rounder Max Planck was especially devoted to the German Physical Society and actively involved in the scientific life of his century. His writings depict not only his achievements as a scientist but also shed a light on an era of important discoveries. The facsimiles in this collection are introduced by and complemented with topical articles by well-known physicists and science historians. ... Read more

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This volume is produced from digital images created through the University of Michigan University Library's large-scale digitization efforts. The Library seeks to preserve the intellectual content of items in a manner that facilitates and promotes a variety of uses. The digital reformatting process results in an electronic version of the original text that can be both accessed online and used to create new print copies. The Library also understands and values the usefulness of print and makes reprints available to the public whenever possible. This book and hundreds of thousands of others can be found in the HathiTrust, an archive of the digitized collections of many great research libraries. For access to the University of Michigan Library's digital collections, please see http://www.lib.umich.edu and for information about the HathiTrust, please visit http://www.hathitrust.org ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Lectures of a much too silent genius
Take care! This is something for physicians or those who know already the basics of quantum physics and just want to read something (almost) original. I know Plancks writing in German and must admit that I have difficulties with an English translation - my deficiencies hopefully and not the translators who should have understood what Planck was talking about. This is always a problem with translations of technical, scientific or philosophic texts. The latter - in face of Planck also being a philosopher - is especially delicate as the German language has many special abstract words in the range of philosophy for which it is difficult to find an English equivalent.
Here a summary of Planck and his ideas in short which you should know before going into the details of the lectures in this book.
The German physician Max Planck is regarded as one of the most important physicians of both the 19th and 20th century. He received the Nobel prize in 1918. His exploring spirit stood in the beginning of Quantum physics.
Similar to his friend Albert Einstein he wanted to explore the basic principles of physics. This can also bee taken from his leitmotiv, which said: Hin zu Gott!" Up to God! Why this? Because he did not believe in a rigid, deterministic causality of all Sein" (of all what is), rather in a "the divine spirit" as "a stream of information, the A and O of all visible and invisible and unreachable things". That attitude of mind is significant in all his lectures.
According to Planck natural science is based on two cornerstones: 1. science gives man the recognition through the five senses and 2. it gives man action, "which is when he expresses his mental attitude, his opinion, his conviction, for which he needs the connection to God. That immediacy brings him clear order, inner firmness and lasting peace for soul and herewith the highest form of human life-quality". You could also say the cornerstones are the capability to recognize the outside "physical" world and the inside "spiritual" world, the latter being the A and O of the first.
Atheist scientist might ridicule this idea, but it were theists like Planck, Born, Pascual Jordan, Nils Bohr and Heisenberg who found the basis for modern physics. And they were all idealists.
Planck made clear in his writings and lectures that physics must bet he most exact science; that physical knowledge is basedonmeasurement of processes which take place in space and time; that therefore one is forced to calculate with different quantities of time and space; that all physical processes can be traced back to the movements of certain elementary particles and that the small numbers, with which this is demonstrated are universal absolute terms and changeless building stones of the scheme oftheoretical physics. So to speak they are the building stones of universe.
In all processes of nature universal lawfulness is at work. Planck has the example of the principle of the conservation of energy. He was also making significant contributions to the formulation of the The "Third Law of thermodynamics".Named after him is the "Planck's constant", a physical constant, which proves the principle of the smallest effects. With this constant Planck could prove, that all natural processes can be traced back on volatile processes in the range of elementary particles. Exactly spoken nothing is fixed or determined. This knowledge is recognized in the meantime. Thus Planck became the pioneer and trailblazer for quantum physics.
Starting with the belief that nature is ruled and guided by an almighty reason, by a reason which is at the same time oriented to effect and purpose and existing independent of a thinking mankind, his research brought him to reflections that led to quantum physics. Einstein once said in Planck the ideal of recognition was embodied in a rare perfection.
It is Plancks merit to have realized that empirism cannot be the starting point of scientific thinking. The world as it is can only be understood when the principle of idealism is applied, because only then it can be perceived that the final things are not the final things per se and the obvious datum is not the datum per se. It must be kept in mind that the Whole is more than the single parts.
His speeches and writings are characterized by that idealism. The words he speaks are in our time seldom heard. But they were never disproved. His physical knowledge has stood the test of time and became the foundations of modern physics. Planck saw as well that this knowledge must be of fundamental meaning for the other fields of science. Today with so many different disciplines that specialized and dispersed in development, it would be even more important to recognize this.

Although in the outline of his concepts he is not too abstract. All intelligent designs of natureare of logic ingenuity.

Personally More attuned to his book Philosophy of Physics
But I can appreciate lectures on reversibility and irreversibility, on the atomic theory of matter, on an equation of state, on heat radiation & electrodynamic theory, on the principle of least action, and on the principle of relativity. ... Read more

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Max Planck is a Capstone Press publication.

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Max Planck (1858-1947) zählt zu den herausragenden Physikern des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts. Seine Quantenhypothese wurde zur Grundlage für die Entwicklung der Quantentheorie und bildet eine der zentralen Säulen der modernen Physik. Damit ist Plancks Wirken jedoch keineswegs erschöpfend charakterisiert: In diesem Buch arbeiten anerkannte Physikhistoriker das gesamte Spektrum von Plancks physikalischem Schaffen heraus und würdigen seine Bedeutung für die Entwicklung der modernen Physik.

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This publication constitutes the first scholarly periodical to focus on activities of the United Nations in the field of international law. It recognizes the recent increased impact of the development of the World Organization, its Specialized Agencies and other aspects of the United Nations System, as well as their effect on the shaping of international relations. ... Read more

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This volume gives a detailed account of the parameters for technical standards and measures seeking to protect health and environment ... Read more

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For more than 10 years now, the "Max Planck Yearbook of United Nations Law" has become a much sought after forum for essays in international law related to the UN. Volume 12 (2008) again contains articles dealing with a variety of topics such as Security Council Powers and the Exigencies of Justice after War and Revitalising the United Nations Human Rights Special Procedures Mechanisms as a Means of Achieving and Maintaining International Peace and Security; as well as an article on the topic of the Principle of Non-Refoulement at Sea and the Effectiveness of Asylum Protection.This volume also contains in depth articles dealing with Rule of Law. This is only a selection, showing the wide range of topics. This volume is therefore again a must for any academic or practitioner involved in international law and questions concerning the United Nations. ... Read more

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Webster's bibliographic and event-based timelines are comprehensive in scope, covering virtually all topics, geographic locations and people. They do so from a linguistic point of view, and in the case of this book, the focus is on "Max-Planck," including when used in literature (e.g. all authors that might have Max-Planck in their name). As such, this book represents the largest compilation of timeline events associated with Max-Planck when it is used in proper noun form. Webster's timelines cover bibliographic citations, patented inventions, as well as non-conventional and alternative meanings which capture ambiguities in usage. These furthermore cover all parts of speech (possessive, institutional usage, geographic usage) and contexts, including pop culture, the arts, social sciences (linguistics, history, geography, economics, sociology, political science), business, computer science, literature, law, medicine, psychology, mathematics, chemistry, physics, biology and other physical sciences. This "data dump" results in a comprehensive set of entries for a bibliographic and/or event-based timeline on the proper name Max-Planck, since editorial decisions to include or exclude events is purely a linguistic process. The resulting entries are used under license or with permission, used under "fair use" conditions, used in agreement with the original authors, or are in the public domain. ... Read more

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In several major areas of international trade¿particularly software and technology transfer¿a harmonised regime of intellectual property law is a crucial prerequisite to success. Yet this legal concept appears to be extraordinarily difficult to establish on any agreed-upon basis among countries. And nowhere has the sought-for harmonisation proven more intractable than in the countries of the Asia Pacific region.

Intellectual Property Harmonisation in ASEAN and APEC investigates the complex issues that lie at the root of this major block to the unhampered global flow of commerce based on intangible assets. By highlighting the background of Asian legal systems, both in terms of culture and intellectual property systems, the authors suggest how the current obstacles towards greater harmonisation and integration may be overcome. Defining the accepted principles enshrined in TRIPS, the Paris Convention, and other international agreements, the presentation describes the relatively successful European experience and then goes on to develop strategic variations geared to relate more precisely to harmonisation, integration and co-operation in the East Asian region.

Among the important elements of the problem (and its potential solutions) discussed in this book are the following:

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In the decade since the establishment of the WTO, the great majority of disputes between member states resolved and decided through the dispute settlement system of the WTO arose in the field of trade remedies law, a fact which clearly shows the high demand by the trade community for the rule of law in this area. Responsive to such needs, the fourth volume encompasses the whole range of trade remedies regulation under the auspices of the WTO in the respective articles of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the related multilateral agreements on trade in goods, i.e., Articles VI, XII, XIX GATT 1994; the Understanding on the Balance-of-Payments; the Agreement on Implementation of Article VI GATT 1994 (Anti-Dumping Agreement); the Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Duties; and, the Agreement on Safeguards. Leading practitioners and scholars have gathered to provide an invaluable insight and easy access to the law on trade remedies in an article-by-article commentary approach.As such, it will be an essential work not only for trade remedies practitioners, but also to persons interested in trade remedies be they scholars; academics; international and domestic lawyers; political scientists and economists; or NGO representatives. ... Read more

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This study, covering almost a thousand years of art history in Lucca, also provides a model for a wider investigation of the political iconography of the Italian city-states, of which Lucca is a particularly relevant example. Max Seidel, Professor of Art History at several European universities, and director of the Art Institute of Florence, is one of the most respected authorities of the arts of the Middle Ages. Romano Silva, director of the Istituto Storico Lucchese, is known as one of the foremost experts in the area of Italian Art History. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Science is based on a Faith in Facts
This text should be read by anyone who really is or has plumbed the depths of science and/or technology.Keep in mind that Max Plank's contributions are at the heart of modernity...from semiconductor crystals to electromagnetic transmissions.

In this 1930's text Max Plank goes out of his way to point out problems with what most might think would be rock-solid common sense.For example, he discusses, at length, causality (cause and effect reasoning).His conclusion is that it is"neither correct nor incorrect" just an "heuristic principle."

Max Plank also argues that a strong faith in an "ideal spirit" is an essential prerequisite of any good and useful approach to scientific problem solving.

From page 81:

"Scientific thought always requires a certain distance and a clear separation as between the thinking subject and the object of his thought, and this distance is best guaranteed by the assumption of an ideal spirit."

Here's a quote from pp. 121-122:

"The material must therefore be completed, and this must be done by filling the gaps; and this in turn is done by means of associations of ideas.And associations of ideas are not the work of the understanding but the offspring of the investigator's imagination--an activity which may be described as faith, or, more cautiously, as a working hypothesis.The essential point is that its content in one way or another goes beyond the data of experience. The chaos of individual masses cannot be wrought into a cosmos without some harmonizing force and, similarly, the disjointed data of experience can never furnish a veritable science without the intelligent interference of a spirit actuated by faith."

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