Planck was often unlucky in life. His beloved first wife died early in 1909, and the younger of his two sons was killed in the First World War. He also had twin daughters whom he adored. One died giving birth. The surviving twin went to look after the baby and fell in love with her sister’s husband. They married and two years later she died in childbirth. In 1944, when Planck was eighty-five, an Allied bomb fell on his house and he lost everything —papers,diaries, a lifetime of accumulations. The following year his surviving son was caught in a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler and executed.
- A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson
Not just this, in 1875 he started working on entropy and put his heart and soul into that work. When in 1891, he published his paper, he found out that the work has already been done by J. Willard Gibbs at Yale. Even with all these difficulties and years of work wasted, Plank went on to contribute tremendously in field of physics specially in black body radiation. He won Nobel prize in 1918 for his work on quantum theory.
I just find it as an inspiring story of how not to stop your work with whatever failures we get on the way. And appreciation of one more physicist that I like.
Book recommendation : A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
