Planck was descended from a line of legal workers, public servants and scholars, professors of Law and Divinity and Göttingen, traits which seem not at all absent from his character, but rather deeply ingrained within it.

> "...that our laws of thinking conform with the lawfulness in the

passage of impressions which we receive from the outer world, thus making it possible for man to gain information about that lawfulness by mere thinking. In this it is of the highest significance that the outer world represents some­ thing independent of us and absolute with which we are confronted, and the search for the laws which govern this absolute has appeared to me as the most fascinating work of a lifetime."

Planck was not necessarily destined to go into physics, having deep interest and curiosity about language, and musical composition, the latter of which remained consistent throughout his life. It is a well known, stunning, and absurdly ironic fact that he was advised by his professor at Munich, Philipp von Jolly, to pursue a study other than physics, telling him "In this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few holes."

Nonetheless, he delved into the study, under Kirchhoff and Helmholtz, and ended up focusing on the principle of conservation of energy, and then thermodynamics. His perspective on thermodynamics was that a previous definition, from Clausius, of irreversibility, was not sufficient, due it its admittance of reversibility via indirect means, suggesting that irreversibility requires that a natural process can not be undone without compensation.

Planck was, like many physicists of his time, imbued with a thorough and personal philosophical perspective on his work, and field of study.