Max Planck Trivia
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49 free Max Planck trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Max Planck trivia quiz covers the reluctant revolutionary who invented the quantum while trying to save classical physics. The easy questions handle the constant, the Nobel Prize, the famous relation between energy and frequency and the society that bears his name. From there it moves into the life: the Kiel childhood, the professor who told him physics was nearly finished, the entropy nobody in Berlin wanted to hear about, the lectures Lise Meitner found dry, and the musical evenings with a violin-playing friend. The harder end covers the 'act of despair' of December 1900, the pennies of the atomic world, the Solvay conference, the manifesto he signed in 1914, the meeting with Hitler, the 'white Jews' attack, the medal handed to de Broglie on his 80th birthday, the air raid that destroyed his papers and the son executed after the July plot. Every answer was checked against Planck's encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our physics and famous physicists quizzes are the natural next stop.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which honour, awarded to Planck a year late in 1919, cited 'his discovery of energy quanta'?
Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prize in Physics for 1918. By then quanta were at the heart of the new physics, yet Planck had spent years trying to fit them back into classical theory and was among the last to give up the attempt.
Q 02In which German city was Planck born in 1858?
Kiel
Kiel. His family left for Munich in 1867, when his father took up a chair there, and Planck came back in 1885 for his own first professorship.
Q 03Planck's radiation formula of 1900 explained the spectrum of light given off by which idealised object?
A black body
A black body. Its glow depends only on its temperature, not on what it is made of, so explaining it promised a truly universal result, the kind of certainty Planck was always looking for.
Q 04Planck's father was a university professor of which subject?
Law
Law. His father's standing as a jurist helped Planck too: by his own account he owed his first professorship, in 1885, less to his research than to a physics professor who was his father's close friend.
Q 05Planck's earliest memories included Prussian and Austrian troops marching into his home town in 1864 to fight which country?
Denmark
Denmark. Prussia and Austria took the Danish crown's southern duchies in that war, then fell out over how to run them and went to war with each other two years later.
Q 06Which principle, taught by his school maths teacher Hermann Muller, first showed the young Planck a truth independent of human beings?
Conservation of energy
Conservation of energy. Planck said he took it in like a revelation, the first rule he knew to hold whatever people did or thought, and the search for more such laws became his life's work.
Q 07Which rare musical gift did Planck possess?
Absolute pitch
Absolute pitch. Planck seriously considered a career in music, but when he asked a professional musician for advice he was told that if he had to ask, he had better study something else.
Q 08Which instrument did Planck himself play at the house concerts he hosted in Berlin?
Piano
Piano. He played every day, and the famous violinist Joseph Joachim, a close friend, was among the musicians who came to his home to play with him.
Q 09Why did Professor Philipp von Jolly advise the young Planck against theoretical physics?
The field was almost complete
The field was almost complete, Jolly told him, with only a few gaps left to fill. Planck went into it anyway, and his quantum hypothesis later overturned that settled picture.
Q 10Self-study of Rudolf Clausius's writings in Berlin led Planck to choose which field?
Thermodynamics
Thermodynamics. He taught himself the subject from Clausius's papers and wrote his 1879 thesis on its second law, but by his own account its effect on the physicists of the day was nil.
Q 11Which Berlin teacher, Planck recalled, never prepared his lectures properly and kept miscalculating at the blackboard?
Hermann von Helmholtz
Hermann von Helmholtz. Planck said the class bored the great man at least as much as it bored his students, yet he later came to revere Helmholtz, who recommended him for his Berlin post.
Q 12In 1889 Planck was named successor to which physicist's position at the University of Berlin?
Kirchhoff
Kirchhoff. Planck was the third choice: Berlin first approached Ludwig Boltzmann and then Heinrich Hertz, and the post came to him only after both had turned it down.
Q 13In 1907 Planck turned down the late Ludwig Boltzmann's chair in which city, preferring to stay in Berlin?
Vienna
Q 21The Planck relation says the energy of a photon is proportional to what?
Its frequency
Its frequency. So a single photon of blue light carries more energy than one of red light, and a photon of ultraviolet light carries more still.
Q 22Planck called energy quanta 'the pennies of the' what?
Atomic world
Atomic world. Each 'penny' is so small that heat and light seem to flow smoothly in everyday life; the graininess only shows on the very smallest scales.
Q 23Planck later described his reluctant use of Boltzmann's statistical methods in 1900 as 'an act of' what?
Despair
Despair. A theoretical explanation 'had to be found at any price', he wrote, so he gave up one of his most cherished beliefs and accepted the statistical view of heat he had resisted for years.
Vienna. With Planck out of the running, the chair went to one of Boltzmann's own former students, the young Friedrich Hasenohrl, who was later killed fighting in the First World War.
Q 14Who succeeded Planck in his Berlin chair when he retired?
Erwin Schrodinger
Erwin Schrodinger. The author of wave mechanics turned out to share Planck's outlook: both men refused to accept the statistical, indeterministic reading of quantum theory that Niels Bohr and his school championed.
Q 15Which concept, central to Planck's early work, was dismissed in Berlin as a mathematical ghost when he first spoke of it?
Entropy
Entropy. Planck recalled that he was then essentially the only theoretical physicist in Berlin, which did not make things easy, yet by 1900 the unfashionable idea had led him to the quantum.
Q 16What did the European Space Agency's Planck space telescope, launched in 2009, spend four years mapping?
The cosmic microwave background
The cosmic microwave background. This faint afterglow of the Big Bang has the spectrum described by the radiation formula Planck found in 1900, and the mission was renamed in his honour.
Q 17Which future co-discoverer of nuclear fission found Planck's lectures at first 'somewhat impersonal, almost dry'?
Lise Meitner
Lise Meitner. She soon decided that her first impression had little to do with the man himself, and from 1912 she worked in Berlin as Planck's assistant.
Q 18Since 2019, the exact value of Planck's constant has been used to define which unit of measurement?
The kilogram
The kilogram. For more than a century it was defined by a metal cylinder kept in a triple-locked vault near Paris; since 2019 it has rested on the fixed value of Planck's constant instead.
Q 19Which American had already published most of Planck's early results on chemical equilibrium?
Josiah Willard Gibbs
Josiah Willard Gibbs. His papers did not appear in German until 1892, and Planck wrote ruefully that the American had got there first, 'so that in this particular field no recognition was to be mine'.
Q 20Planck first presented his quantum hypothesis in December 1900 to which body?
German Physical Society
The German Physical Society. It had heard his new radiation formula only eight weeks earlier; in between came what he called the hardest weeks of work of his life, spent finding a reason why the formula was true.
Q 24Measurements in 1900 showed that Wien's radiation law, which Planck had tried to prove, broke down where?
At low frequencies
At low frequencies. The verdict came from infrared measurements by Rubens and Kurlbaum; Planck heard of them just before a meeting on 19 October 1900 and offered a new formula there that fitted at both ends.
Q 25The Planck constant is conventionally written with which letter?
h
h. Planck called it the quantum of action, since it is an energy multiplied by a time, and built on it a set of 'natural units' meant to hold for all times and all cultures, even non-human ones.
Q 26Though he launched quantum theory, Planck long resisted the idea that light is made of what?
Particles
Particles. Planck would not give up Maxwell's wave theory, and warned that the new idea would throw the theory of light back not by decades but by centuries.
Q 27Planck was among the few who immediately grasped the importance of which 1905 theory?
Special relativity
Special relativity. Planck lectured on the new theory within months, defended it when experiments seemed to contradict it, and so won it an early hearing in Germany.
Q 28Planck was among the physicists who gathered in 1911 for the first Solvay Conference, held in which city?
Brussels
Brussels. The talks there spurred Henri Poincare to prove that Planck's radiation formula could not hold without quanta, a proof that won over doubters such as James Jeans.
Q 29In 1914 Planck and Walther Nernst succeeded in bringing which physicist to Berlin, later Planck's close friend and musical partner?
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein. Planck and Nernst travelled to Zurich in 1913 to tempt him with a post that carried no teaching duties, and he moved to Berlin in April 1914.
Q 30The 1914 manifesto Planck signed denied German atrocities in which neutral country?
Belgium
Belgium. The 'Manifesto of the Ninety-Three' defended the German army's conduct there; in 1916, with the war still on, Planck published an open letter to the Dutch physicist Lorentz that retreated from its wording.