Dilemmas of an Upright Man: Max Planck and the Fortunes of German Science Book

This quite a good book, but not exactly the book I expected. It isn't a general biography of Planck, nor a review of his scientific career. Rather, it is about Planck as administrator and as moral actor. He comes up very well in this account; as a hard-working, decent, wise, and fair person,

Planck was not merely an eminent theoretician, he had an incredible scope of authority over German physics. He had served as president or board member of pretty much every major society and institute: The University of Berlin, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, the Berlin Academy, etc etc. His conduct in all these posts was praised uniformly for its probity and fairness.

I now understand much better why the major German research institutes are the "Max Planck Institutes". Planck, as leader of the KWI, went to a lot of effort to wrangle up the money for a pure physics institute. Peter Debye, the first president of the physics institute, named it after Planck. After the war, when there was pressure to change the KWI name, the authorities decided to name the whole system after Planck.

Planck managed to navigate the rather painful politics of the 20th century looking like an impressively decent person. He fought quietly, but with some success, to keep jews employed; after they left, he spoke up on behalf of their reputations in ways that were distressing to the Nazis -- he was marked in their files as politically suspect. His son was executed for plotting against Hitler.

Planck was philosophically minded, and had a number of sensible things to say about the meaning of science, and its relations with other aspects of human life.

In 1926 (before Heisenberg's work on the uncertainty principle) Planck offered the following ingenious argument to reconcile determinism with free will. Determinism says that given complete information about the past, we can predict the future. And of course, our actions are often predictable: we can often predict what others will do, and we can explain our past or future decisions. But we have free will, because when we deliberate, we alter our state of mind, making prediction impossible and insulating our subsequent state of mind from the known factors that went into it.

There are philosophical objections to this argument, but I was struck by two things: first, it has a distinct uncertainty principle flavor, despite being articulated before the Uncertainty Principle, and by a scientist who found Heisenberg's physics highly suspect philosophically.