The biggest revolution in the history of physics was started by a man who was desperately trying to keep everything exactly the same. This episode is a deep dive into Max Planck, the reluctant father of quantum theory, whose 1900 fix for the ultraviolet catastrophe of blackbody radiation broke classical physics open while he himself spent years trying to put it back together.

We trace the science: the localized problem of glowing ovens that classical thermodynamics could not solve, the "act of despair" in which Planck quantized energy in discrete packets to make the math work, his 1918 Nobel Prize for the discovery of energy quanta, and the deep irony of a physicist who kept trying to disprove his own breakthrough while complaining that older scientists never change their minds. As the episode shows, Planck's stubbornness was not hyp ...