1 Brief Biography

moving biography. He was not only one of the creators of modern Physics but also witness and actor of the most fateful events of the 20th century. Interwoven with these historic vicissitudes is his rather tragic personal life, having lost four of his five children, two of them through violence, the others, identical twins, in the aftermath of childbirth. His biographic literature is rather copious, starting with a scientific autobiography [1]. We refer here to the other biographical works we have used, in particular the investigations of the science historian Dieter Hoffmann [2-7]. We shall only mention some of the numerous short biographical accounts appeared in scientific journals and the general press when appropriate. For the sake of conciseness, we give Planck’s biography in tabular form. 1858 Born April 23, 1858 in Kiel as the fourth child of the lawyer Johann Julius Wilhelm Planck and his wife Emma née Patzig. In his Lutheran baptismal record his name appears as Marx (sic) Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck. He published under the name of Max Planck but in th