In 1889, Planck moved to the University of Berlin, becoming a full professor in 1892.

In April 1885, the University of Kiel appointed him as an associate professor of theoretical physics, and he continued to pursue work on heat theory and on Rudolph Clausius’ ideas about entropy and its application in physical chemistry. Having completed his habilitation thesis on heat theory in 1880, Planck became an unpaid private lecturer in Munich, waiting until he was offered an academic position. There, he came under the tutelage of Hermann Müller, who taught him astronomy and mechanics as well as mathematics, and awoke Planck’s early interest in physics.Īlthough a talented musician (he sang, played the piano, organ and cello, and composed songs and even operas), he chose to study physics at the University of Munich in 1874, soon transferring to theoretical physics, before going on to Berlin for a year of further study in 1877.

In 1867, the family moved to Munich, where Planck attended the Ludwig Maximilians gymnasium school. His family was traditional and intellectual (his father was a law professor and his grandfather and great-grandfather had been theology professors). Karl Ernst Ludwig Marx Planck, better known as Max, was born in Kiel in Holstein, northern Germany on 23 April 1858. This is generally regarded as the first essential stepping stone in the development of quantum theory, which has revolutionized the way we see and understand the sub-atomic world. Around the turn of the century, he realized that light and other electromagnetic waves were emitted in discrete packets of energy that he called ' quanta' - 'quantum' in the singlular - which could only take on certain discrete values (multiples of a certain constant, which now bears the name the “ Planck constant”). Max Planck was a German theoretical physicist, considered to be the initial founder of quantum theory, and one of the most important physicists of the 20th Century.

Max planck a survey of physical theory