50 free Max Planck trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 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 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01For which year was Planck awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, 'for his discovery of energy quanta'?
1918
He actually received the award in 1919, and told his son the discovery was comparable only to Newton's.
Q 02In which German city was Planck born in 1858?
Kiel
His father taught law at the university there; the family moved to Munich when he was nine.
Q 03Planck was baptised with which given name, which he had swapped for 'Max' by the age of ten?
Marx
It was recorded as his 'appellation name', but he signed himself Max for the rest of his life.
Q 04Planck's father was a university professor of which subject?
Law
His grandfather and great-grandfather had both been theology professors at Gottingen.
Q 05One of Planck's earliest memories was of Prussian and Austrian troops marching into his home town during which war?
The Second Schleswig War
He was six at the time; war was a constant background of his childhood.
Q 06At what age did Planck graduate early from his Munich gymnasium?
17
His maths teacher Hermann Muller had introduced him to the conservation of energy, his first contact with physics.
Q 07Which rare musical gift did Planck possess?
Absolute pitch
He played piano, organ and cello, and composed an opera, Die Liebe im Walde, as a student.
Q 08At Planck's weekly musical soirees in Berlin, a famous physicist friend played which instrument?
Violin
The renowned violinist Joseph Joachim was another regular; Planck himself was usually at the keyboard.
Q 09Why did Professor Philipp von Jolly advise the young Planck against theoretical physics?
The field was almost complete
Jolly thought the conservation of energy had all but finished the subject; Planck ignored him.
Q 10The only experiments of Planck's career studied hydrogen diffusing through heated what?
Platinum
After that he switched to theory for good.
Q 11Self-study of Rudolf Clausius's writings in Berlin led Planck to choose which field?
Thermodynamics
His 1879 doctoral thesis was on the second law of the mechanical theory of heat.
Q 12Which of his Berlin teachers did Planck find 'never quite prepared' and endlessly miscalculating?
Hermann von Helmholtz
He nonetheless became close friends with him, and Helmholtz probably secured his Berlin chair.
Q 13In 1889 Planck was named successor to which physicist's position at the University of Berlin?
Kirchhoff
He became a full professor there by 1892 and stayed until retirement in 1926.
Q 21Planck presented his quantum hypothesis to the physics society in Berlin on 14 December of which year?
1900
The date is generally taken as the birth of quantum physics.
Q 22The Planck relation E = hv says the energy of a photon is proportional to what?
Its frequency
The constant of proportionality, h, is now used to define the kilogram.
Q 23Planck called energy quanta 'the pennies of the' what?
Atomic world
Radiant heat, he said, was not a continuous flow but 'a discontinuous mass, made up of units all of which are similar to one another'.
Q 14In 1907 Planck turned down the late Ludwig Boltzmann's chair in which city, preferring to stay in Berlin?
Vienna
Two years later he was lecturing at Columbia University in New York.
Q 15Who succeeded Planck in his Berlin chair when he retired in January 1926?
Erwin Schrodinger
Both men would later reject the Copenhagen interpretation of the quantum theory Planck had started.
Q 16Planck recalled that when he first mentioned entropy in Berlin it was regarded as a mathematical what?
Spook
He was, he said, essentially the only theoretical physicist there.
Q 17Planck's initiative merged Germany's local physics societies in 1898 to form what?
The German Physical Society
He was its president from 1905 to 1909, and it later created the Max Planck Medal as its highest honour.
Q 18Which future co-discoverer of nuclear fission called Planck's lectures 'dry, somewhat impersonal'?
Lise Meitner
An English listener disagreed, calling him 'the best lecturer I ever heard', even as fainting students dropped to the floor of the overheated room.
Q 19Roughly how many graduate students did Planck have in his whole career?
About 20
He never founded a 'school'; those he did supervise included Max von Laue and Walther Bothe.
Q 20Which American scientist's thermodynamic formalism did Planck unknowingly rediscover?
Josiah Willard Gibbs
Gibbs's essays did not appear in German until 1892; Planck's approach is credited with the greater universality.
Q 24Planck later described his reluctant use of Boltzmann's statistical methods in 1900 as 'an act of' what?
Despair
'I was ready to sacrifice any of my previous convictions about physics,' he added.
Q 25Wien's radiation law matched experiment for blue and ultraviolet light but failed where?
At low frequencies
The rival Rayleigh-Jeans law had the opposite problem, the so-called ultraviolet catastrophe.
Q 26The Planck constant is conventionally written with which letter?
h
Planck first introduced it in 1899 as the 'action quantum'.
Q 27Planck initially rejected which hypothesis, put forward to explain the photoelectric effect?
Light quanta
He would not give up Maxwell's electrodynamics, warning it would throw the theory of light back 'not by decades, but by centuries'.
Q 28Planck was among the few who immediately grasped the importance of which 1905 theory?
Special relativity
Thanks to his influence it was quickly accepted in Germany, and he recast it in terms of classical action.
Q 29Planck and Walther Nernst organised the First Solvay Conference in 1911 in which city?
Brussels
It was there that he was finally convinced about the quantum nature of light.
Q 30As dean in Berlin, Planck created a 1914 professorship for which physicist, later a close friend and musical partner?
Albert Einstein
The two met frequently to play music together, and Einstein later called Planck a worshipper 'in the Temple of Science'.