Max Planck Medal

• 1. Introduction

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  The Max Planck Medal first went to two physicists in 1929: Max Planck himself and Albert Einstein. It is a German prize, given for theoretical physics, and it has been handed out for almost a century. Some winners are household names. Others are known mostly to specialists. What does a winner actually receive? What happened in 1943, when the metal for the medal could not be cast? And which years passed with no winner at all?

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• 2. Gold and Parchment

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  A gold medal and a hand-written parchment await each person who wins the Max Planck Medal. The prize comes from the German Physical Society, known in German as the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft. That society is the world's largest organization of physicists. It treats this medal as its highest award for extraordinary achievements in theoretical physics.

  The prize has been given every year since 1929, with few exceptions. Most years it goes to a single person.

  Theory is only half of the society's physics. For outstanding results in experimental physics, it keeps a separate top honor called the Stern-Gerlach Medal.

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• 3. The Bombed Foundry

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  In 1943 a bomb hit the foundry in Berlin where the medals were made. That year the gold medal could not be manufactured. The board of directors of the German Physical Society chose a practical answer. Medals would be made in a substitute metal for the time being. The gold ones would be delivered later.

  The list for that year names Friedrich Hund. The prize itself carried on, even with wartime damage to the foundry. The following year's entry is Walther Kossel, and then the list goes quiet.

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• 4. Years Without Winners

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  Three separate runs of three years each stand empty on the list: 1934-36, 1939-41 and 1945-47. Between the first two gaps, the medal went to Erwin Schrödinger in 1937 and Louis de Broglie in 1938. Werner Heisenberg's name sits just before the first gap, in 1933.

  Single empty years also appear in 1965-1971 and 1980. Nothing in the list explains them.

  After the long pause at the end of the 1940s, the prize returned in 1948 with Max Born.

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• 5. Shared Honors

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  In 1949 Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn were named together. Two years later the medal went jointly to James Franck and Gustav Hertz. A third pairing came in 1964, when Samuel Goudsmit and George Uhlenbeck shared it.

  These are the exceptions to the single-name pattern. Just one year separates the first two of those pairings, and the year between them belongs to Peter Debye alone.

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• 6. A Roll Call

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  The 1950s read like a gathering of theoretical physics: Paul Dirac in 1952, Walther Bothe in 1953, Enrico Fermi in 1954, Hans Bethe in 1955 and Victor Weisskopf in 1956. Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker followed in 1957, then Wolfgang Pauli in 1958. Oskar Klein, Lev Landau and Eugene Wigner took the next three years, from 1959 to 1961.

  Later decades brought Freeman Dyson in 1969 and Yoichiro Nambu in 1985. Peter Zoller won in 2005, Giorgio Parisi in 2011 and Juan Ignacio Cirac in 2018.

  The most recent entries run from Annette Zippelius in 2022 through Rashid A. Sunyaev, Erwin Frey and Reinhard F. Werner. The newest name on the list is Kurt Kremer, for 2026.

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