Thermodynamics is a funny subject. The first time you go through it, you don't understand it at all. The second time you go through it, you think you understand it, except for one or two small points. The third time you go through it, you know you don't understand it, but by that time you are so used to it, you don't care.
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"No burden is so heavy for a man to bear as a succession of happy days."
"The creative scientist has to be a man of faith. He must have faith in his results, and in the laws of nature."
"Physics is a science of the real world, not of the subjective impressions of the individual."
"The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine."
"I consider the consciousness as fundamental. I consider matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existin…"
Often attributed to Arnold Sommerfeld, but sometimes to Planck or other physicists, reflecting the difficulty of the subject.
Date: Early 20th century
GeneralFound in 1 providers: grok
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Thermodynamics is so counterintuitive that learning it happens in stages of false confidence. At first it makes no sense. Later you feel you've mastered it, aside from nagging gaps. Eventually you realize you never truly understood it, but familiarity has replaced comprehension and you've stopped worrying about the gap. Deep understanding gives way to comfortable acceptance.
Planck spent his career wrestling with thermodynamics, which drove his 1900 black-body work and the quantum hypothesis. Trained as a thermodynamicist under Kirchhoff, he reluctantly broke classical physics to solve the ultraviolet catastrophe. His honesty about confusion matches his character: a cautious, methodical thinker who distrusted his own quantum result for years and only embraced it after Einstein and Bohr validated it.
Around 1900, physics seemed nearly complete, yet thermodynamics and radiation harbored paradoxes classical mechanics couldn't resolve. Planck's era saw the old deterministic worldview crumble into quantum and relativistic physics. Universities treated thermodynamics as foundational but notoriously difficult, and entropy debates between Boltzmann, Mach, and Ostwald roiled German science. Planck's quip captures a generation of physicists confronting a subject whose statistical foundations kept shifting beneath them.
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