GRAVESTONE OF MAX PLANCK -Ralph E. Oesper, University of

MAX PLANCK (h. April 23, 1858, Kiel) lived and worked in Berlin from 1889. In World War I1 his house went up in flames during an air raid, and his lib...
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JOURNAL O F CHEMICAL EDUCATION

GRAVESTONE OF MAX PLANCK MAXPLANCK (h. April 23, 1858, Kiel) lived and worked in Berlin from 1889. In World War I1 his house went up in flames during an air raid, and his library, collected throughout his exceptionally long lifetime, disappeared, no one knows where. In the middle of May, 1945, the American authorities sent a car to his estate of Rogatz on the Elbe, then a theater of war, and took him to Gottingen, where he would be safe. Here he died on Octoher 4, 1947, almost four-score-and-ten. The mortal remains of this great theoretical physicist, the author of the quantum theory, rest in the Gottingen Stadtfriedhof. The grave is fittingly marked by a simple stone, hearing nothing more than his name, and at the foot the Planck constant: h=6.62-10-s4W.s2 ( W.sP=watt second')

-Ralph E. Oesper, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio