> "What led me to my science and from my youth filled me with enthusiasm, is the fact...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...and the search for the laws which govern this absolute has appeared to me as the most fascinating work of a lifetime." (Planck, 1948)

Surprisingly enough, despite his early introduction to the mathematical sciences via Hermann Müller, at age 9, in the Maximilian Gymnasium, he was not necessarily predestined to go into physics. Considering his lineage, his father being a Professor of Law in his hometown, and his having deep interest and curiosity about language, and musical composition, he very well could have taken a number of different paths. Despite this, he dedicated his life to the physical sciences, though he maintained a musical streak, possessing an acknowledgeable skill as a pianist, a hobby he continued throughout the entirety of his life.

He received his doctorate in physics at the age of 21, in 1879, from the University of Munich, delivering a thesis largely focused on thermodynamics, the deep and rigorous study of which, combined with a staunch but respectful intellectual rivalry with Ludwig Boltzmann over its nature, would lead him to the discovery that would eventually send reverberations throughout the deepest foundations of physics: *the quantum of action*. This discovery, and the endless toil it required would, a little under two decades later, reward him with the greatest honor in the field of physics, the Nobel Prize.

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*."

One could say that Ph. von Jolly was correct, with the caveat that of the few remaining "holes" in physics, one of them, the filling of which Max Planck would be responsible for initiating, was absolutely several orders of magnitude more vast, deep, and wide than either of them could have fathomed.

While it is said that this last tragedy sapped his will to live, he was already well into his twilight years, and it seems also that he found some modicum of peace, through his unwavering and thoroughly ingrained religious sense, having said to a friend Anton Kippenberg a month after the loss of his son:

His religiosity, while seeming counterintuitive to the nature of his work, fueled his perspective greatly, such that he in fact felt as if the two were not only complementary, but necessary in tandem in order for man to operate at his highest level:

> "Under no circumstances can there be in this domain the slightest moral compromise, the slightest moral justification for the smallest deviation." (Planck. Scientific autobiography, p. 79, 1949)

The conservation law, as put forth by Émilie du Châtelet, simply states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, but rather only transmuted between different forms, such as kinetic, chemical or potential energy, and that for an isolated system, the sum of the energy released from the system, and still present at the end of some process, can be no greater, or less than was existent in the system at the beginning of the process. This law can be rigorously proved via, and seen as a result of Noether's theorem, which shows that for any conservation law, there is a symmetry, and vice versa. In the case of the conservation of energy, the symmetry is observed under time translation, or the time that has passed from the beginning, to the end of the aforementioned process undergone by some isolated system (or the section of time during which the process is observed).