advice Planck did not follow

Young Max Planck did hear a skeptical assessment of physics’s prospects from his Munich teacher Philipp von Jolly. In Planck’s own later recollection, the wording was more measured: physics was a highly developed, nearly mature science that might soon reach its final form after the discovery of energy conservation. The popular line “everything has been discovered; only a few holes remain” is a shortened retelling, not a reliable verbatim quotation. Planck chose physics anyway and later founded quantum theory. The illustration is AI-generated.