Planck’s Cosmic Harmonium 269
Even if one hesitates to take this analogy as definitive, Planck ’ s experience with musical
issues arguably had a significant effect on his whole approach to the black-body question.
Though an avowed champion of what he conceived as the universal, transhuman project
of physics, he confronted and came to terms with the human aspects of tuning, in untrained
hearers, skilled musicians, and even in himself, bearing out Heilbron ’ s general observation
that “ his ear gradually lost its absolutism and allowed him greater satisfaction. ”^35 At the
same time, though, his investigation of the musical dilemmas of tuning allowed him to
return to physics and find a new absolute there: the paradoxes of musical temperament
gave him new flexibility of mind that helped him take the next step past the impasses of
black-body theory, while at the same time enabling him to hold on to the absolute at an
even deeper level, namely his “ natural units ” as expressions of the universal constant h.
He later described his postulation of the quantum as “ an act of desperation, ” undertaken
in the midst of the greatest crisis of his professional life as a physicist, wrestling with the
contingent and seeking the absolute.^36 It seems right to look for the sources of the strength
that saw him through not only in his general Wilhelmian or religious steadfastness (as
informed his chosen motto, “ Ye Must Have Faith ” ) but in the particular details of his own
sensibility, for which music loomed so large in general and for which his musical interlude
of 1893 – 1894 was so significant.^37
However intriguing may be the clues and resemblances that link Planck ’ s musical and
theoretical work, these musical formations very quickly became embedded in the sedi-
mented strata of mathematical formalism. Whatever unconscious similarities might have
moved him as he turned from tuning to black bodies, his theoretical formulation soon
accumulated a growing mathematical vesture that amounted to a kind of “ body. ” Hertz
had observed that, in the end, “ Maxwell ’ s theory is Maxwell ’ s system of equations, ” rather
than the various mechanical models that had moved Maxwell during the process of dis-
covery.^38 Likewise, Planck ’ s theory became his equations of quantization and the attendant
black-body radiation spectrum. As such, their musical prehistory was for the most part
embedded deep inside that formalism or even underneath it, in the sense of Husserl ’ s
geological strata of meaning and intention. So difficult were the conceptual issues and the
downright paradoxes of the emerging quantum theory that at many points it seemed that
only formalism could see it through, leaving intuition and visualizability behind as mere
anthropomorphic illusions.