In June 1946 Max Planck spoke in the Göttingen physics colloquium. Planck was 88 years old, had received the highest honors of his community, including a Nobel Prize in 1918 for his discovery of the quantum, and had profoundly changed how we think about physical reality. He knew something about problems, both in science and in life. He postulated the quantum, famously, “in an act of desperation.” His first wife died young, as did four of his five children, the fourth, Erwin, killed by the Gestapo in 1945. Having lived through all of this, Max Planck decided to talk about problems that are nothing but distraction — scheinproblems.
Max Planck’s scheinproblems
