Planck, the DPG, and the Medal

1. Max Planck (1858–1947)

Born in Kiel, Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck completed a doctoral thesis on the second law of thermodynamics in 1879 at age 21. His mature work was on the thermodynamics of radiation. In December 1900, addressing the ultraviolet catastrophe — the divergence of the Rayleigh–Jeans law for blackbody radiation — Planck introduced what he initially called a “mathematical trick”: the assumption that energy is exchanged between matter and radiation in discrete packets, or quanta:

\( E = h \nu \)

The constant \(h \approx 6.626 \times 10^{-34}\) J·s — Planck’s constant — became the defining numerical constant of the new physics. The Planck radiation law for the spectral radiance of a blackbody at temperature T:

\( B(\nu, T) = \frac{2 h \nu^3}{c^2}\,\frac{1}{e^{h\nu/kT} - 1} \)

fits experimental data to extraordinary precision and reduces to the classical Rayleigh–Jeans and Wien laws in the appropriate limits. Planck received the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics. He was a deeply conservative physicist who did not fully accept the photon-based interpretation of his quanta until Einstein’s 1905 photoelectric paper made it inescapable.

2. The Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft

The Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft(DPG) was founded in 1845 in Berlin and is the oldest physical society in the world that is still in continuous existence. It currently has about 60,000 members, making it the largest physical society in the world by membership. Its 19th-century founders included Hermann von Helmholtz, Werner von Siemens, Emil du Bois-Reymond, and others; Planck himself served as DPG president.

The DPG awards a number of physics prizes annually: the Max Planck Medal (theoretical physics), the Stern–Gerlach Medal (experimental physics), the Gentner–Kastler Prize (with the French Physical Society), the Hertha-Sponer Prize, the Robert Wichard Pohl Prize, and the Lise Meitner Lecture (Module 2). The Max Planck Medal is the most prestigious of these.

3. The Medal’s Establishment, 1929

The Max Planck Medal was instituted by the DPG in 1929 to honour outstanding contributions to theoretical physics. The first medals were awarded jointly to:

• Max Planck — the founder of quantum theory.
• Albert Einstein — relativity, photons, statistical mechanics, the photoelectric effect.

The medal itself is gold and bears Planck’s portrait on the obverse and a Latin inscription on the reverse. It carries no large cash prize — the honour is the medal and the citation. The recipient traditionally delivers an acceptance lecture (a Preisträgervortrag) at the DPG annual spring meeting, which the DPG records and publishes — the source of the videos in Module 1.

4. A Selection of Past Laureates

The medal’s list of recipients is essentially a list of theoretical physics from 1929 onward. A condensed sample, chosen to illustrate the range:

• 1929 — Planck, Einstein (inaugural)
• 1933 — Werner Heisenberg
• 1938 — Arnold Sommerfeld
• 1948 — Max von Laue
• 1955 — Hans Bethe
• 1958 — Wolfgang Pauli
• 1960 — Chen-Ning Yang
• 1961 — Eugene Wigner
• 1965 — John Archibald Wheeler
• 1986 — Steven Weinberg
• 1987 — Edward Witten
• 1988 — Richard Feynman
• 1989 — Julian Schwinger
• 1992 — David Ruelle
• 2003 — Gerardus ’t Hooft
• 2008 — Rashid Sunyaev (Module 1)
• 2014 — Andrzej Buras (Module 1)
• 2015 — Viatcheslav Mukhanov (Module 1)
• 2016 — Herbert Wagner (Module 1)
• 2017 — Herbert Spohn (Module 1)
• 2018 — J. Ignacio Cirac (Module 1)
• 2019 — Detlef Lohse (Module 1)
• 2024 — Erwin Frey (Module 1)

Many laureates have subsequently received the Nobel Prize (Heisenberg 1932 before the medal; Pauli 1945 before; Bethe 1967; Schwinger and Feynman 1965 with Tomonaga; Yang & Lee 1957; Weinberg 1979; ’t Hooft 1999), reflecting the DPG’s keen sense for which theoretical contributions will endure.