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In 1875, when a young German in Kiel named Max Planck was deciding whether to devote his life to mathematics or to physics, he was urged most heartily not to choose physics because the breakthroughs had all been made there. The coming century, he was assured, would be one of consolidation and refinement, not revolution.
1875年，德國基爾有一位名叫馬克斯·普朗克的年輕人猶豫不決，不知道這輩子究竟是該從事數學還是該從事物理學。人們由衷地勸他不要選擇物理學，因為物理學的重大問題都已得到解決。他們斬釘截鐵地告訴他，下個世紀將是個鞏固和提高的世紀，不是個革命的世紀。
Planck didn’t listen. He studied theoretical physics and threw himself body and soul into work on entropy, a process at the heart of thermodynamics, which seemed to hold much promise for an ambitious young man. In 1891 Planck produced his results and learned to his dismay that the important work on entropy had in fact been done already, in this instance by a retiring scholar at Yale University named J. Willard Gibbs.
普朗克不聽，他鉆研理論物理學，潛心投入了熱力學的核心問題——熵的研究工作。在一個雄心勃勃的年輕人看來，研究這個問題似乎很有前途。1891年，他做出了成果，卻吃驚地發現，關于熵的這項重要工作實際上已經有人做過。他是耶魯大學一位離群索居的學者，名叫J.威拉德·吉布斯。
