Max Planck

Max Planck was born in Kiel, Germany, into a family of scholars and pastors. A gifted pianist, he considered a career in music, but chose physics, though a professor told him almost everything in physics had already been discovered. He became professor at the University of Berlin. In 1900, trying to explain the colors of light given off by hot objects, he proposed that energy is given off in tiny separate packets, which he called quanta, each with energy proportional to its frequency. The number linking them is now called Planck's constant. He thought of this at first as a mathematical trick, but it became the starting point of quantum theory, developed further by Einstein, Bohr and others. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918. He was one of the first to recognize Einstein's genius. His life was marked by grief: his first wife and three of his four children died before him, and his son Erwin was executed in 1945 for involvement in the plot against Hitler. Planck himself had protested to Hitler about the dismissal of Jewish scientists. He died in 1947.

Faith: Defended religious belief; he criticized both atheistic attacks on religion and the excessive elevation of religious symbols. Source: Wikipedia