Customer Reviews

Dilemmas of an Upright Man: Max Planck and the Fortunes of German Science

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Professor Heilbron is adept at placing the history of science in a frame of the general history of the times about which he is writing. Max Planck is a puzzle. He was held at fault for his German nationalism at the start of WWI and blamed for not taking a more active role against the Nazi's. But as Heilbron shows the issue were not so simple. Most historians find the behavior of scientists of the opposing sides in WWI as jingoistic. The internationalism of science broke down in childish ways under the influence of national self-righteousness. After signing a manifesto denying that soldiers from such a cultured place as Germany could have wreaked vengeance of the city of Louvain that the Entente claimed they did, Planck discovered the truth and without confronting other scientists who had signed or the German government began to try to reverse scientists understanding of the events. It is interesting that for Planck the burning of Louvain's library seems to have been the most egregious crime not the soldiers' vicious murder of civilians.

Nazism is more complicated. Planck stayed and made accommodations to the Nazis that he felt would preserve some safety and rights for scientists who suffered from Nazi totalitarianism. Heilbron gives us a nuanced picture of Planck yielding to Nazi pressure while retaining some bits of protective cover, then when completely shoved out of the way, subtly undermining, as best he could, Nazi ideology in his talks around the country on science and religion. Einstein left Germany because there was no other choice for him and held Planck accountable for compromising. But such circumstances are not so clear cut. How much different might Tibet now be if the Dalai Lama had stayed as others did to maintain some semblance of their religion in the face of Maoist madness and Chinese imperialism. It was much more courageous though life risking. Tibetans' participation in the Cultural Revolution might have been more muted under His Holiness' influence. In the face of radical disenfranchisement most Jews in Germany left before the Holocaust began. Because Planck was considered by the Nazis as an ideal Teuton, he was given a leeway to protect people and scientific institutions that another might have been destroyed for doing. He also hoped that the institutions would survive Nazism but could be held accountable that their solidity may have contributed to Nazi atomic bomb research.

In most histories of science the history is all about science. A book I keep reading with, hopefully, gradually increasing understanding Order, Chaos Order: The Transition from Classical to Quantum Physics is all formulas---Planck the man does not appear. Professor Heilbron manages to deftly insert the contradictions and achievements of Planck's science into the history of his public and administrative life. Planck, the conservative, who would liked to have been able to explain black body radiation and elemental spectra in terms of classical dynamics and Maxwell's equations ended up making the leap that Einstein was unable to make to quantum explanations. He set off the revolution with the reluctant use of statistical explanations and discontinuity which he was unable to eliminate. And although he tried his best he conceded the necessity of quantum explanations, something Einstein resisted to the end. So Einstein, the scientific revolutionary and political purist became a scientific reactionary and Planck the conservative joined the scientific revolution while accommodating but never surrendering to the political world. Professor Heilbron makes a convincing and sympathetic case that the upright man of the book's title constructively negotiated the political whirlpools of his time.

Although I have read them out of sequence, this is another of Professor's valuable contributions to the history of science as part of the larger history that surrounds the science. Thank you.

Charlie Fisher emeritus professor and author of Dismantling Discontent: Buddha's Way Through Darwin's World

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.

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.