Planck's Prank

Max Planck wasn’t just brilliant. He introduced an entirely new way of looking at the world, through the lens of quantum mechanics.

Prior to Planck, physicists grappled with puzzling inconsistencies in their theories.

After Planck, there was a general understanding that nature wasn’t smooth at all. Instead, it operated on a completely different principle than everyone who ever lived had previously assumed. It turned out that nature was quantized, meaning there is a tiniest thing, or a tiniest amount of distance, or a tiniest amount of time possible.

Today, we call these “Planck units.” The Planck length, for instance, is around 100 million trillion trillion times smaller than a proton. A proton, in turn, is 50,000 times smaller than an atom, and atoms are ten million times smaller than a grain of sand.

Sorry, Keanu. This one gets an OG mind=blown.gif reaction.

Planck’s ideas were so revolutionary that they encountered heavy resistance from eminent physicists. Convincing folks of this new reality took some patience and time, and it also took a good technical understanding of the underling mathematical framework that showed why this was so.

Fortunately, Planck was well equipped for this sort of work, so he began giving a series of lectures in 1918 throughout Germany’s halls of academia.

Unfortunately for Planck, the material presented in the lectures was repetitive (and boring) for such a powerful, innovative mind. Being forced to give such a lecture day after day wasn’t something Planck particularly enjoyed, but the work did pay well enough.

Planck’s only companion during these trips was his chauffer, and they gradually bonded over a shared sense of humor.

One day, Planck decided to play a little prank on the physicists at Munich who were chomping at the bit to hear his lecture.

Instead of delivering the same boring lecture yet again, Planck’s chauffer would instead give today’s presentation. Having heard the lecture many times, this wouldn’t really be much of a stretch at all—he had nearly memorized the speech already, hearing it day after day in various different venues.

Planck agreed, and the chauffeur gave a flawless presentation.

Unfortunately, both men became nervous when a member of the audience asked a tough question, and Planck’s chauffeur was unable to answer it.

All was not lost. In a quick flash of brilliance, his response was flawless.

"I'm surprised and disappointed that in such an advanced city like Munich, I would get such an elementary question. I will ask my chauffeur to answer it."

Planck, pretending to be the chauffer, came up and nailed the answer.

I have a confession: this didn’t really happen. The story of Planck and his chauffeur is almost certainly 100% apocryphal.

Why do physicists continue to tell this story, then?

First, it’s a great story with a fantastic punchline. At the moment of concern, our hero (the Chauffer) saves the day with quick thinking!

Beyond the knee-slapping nature of the tale, there are some important lessons being passed down through this story. There’s an enormous chasm between understanding something at a deep level, and being able to tell people about that thing. Clearly, Planck understood quantum mechanics better than anyone else alive at the time, and that certainly included his chauffer.

Yet equally clearly, those eminent physicists didn’t know any better when the material was presented to them.

If you want to read a little bit about Planck’s contributions to our understanding of the universe and how everything works, I wrote a little about that recently:

What are some of your favorite stories that turned out to be apocryphal? What are some of your favorite clever pranks?