Who is Max Planck from Ideas and Opinions and what is their importance?

Max Planck was a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Berlin. He advanced the quantum theory in 1900, when he determined the absolute magnitudes of atoms and convincingly showed there is a kind of atomistic structure to energy—the basis for all twentieth-century research in physics. Planck's theory shattered the framework of classical mechanics and electrodynamics. In Planck's memory, Einstein hopes free research, for the sake of pure knowledge, will remain unhampered and unimpaired.