Abstract

“Funhouse” and “Big Celebration” of the Physicists. Walter Grotrian's „Physical One-Act Play” for Max Planck's 80th Birthday. On the occasion of Max Planck's 80th birthday on April 23, 1938, a “big celebration of the physicists” was celebrated at the Harnack-House in Berlin. The festivities were organized by the German Physical Society. Part of the ceremony was a “Physical One-act-play” written by the Potsdam astrophysicist Walter Grotrian. The actors of the humorous play were chief protagonists in the development of quantum theory such as Debye, Sommerfeld and Heisenberg. In this essay we analyze Grotrian's drama against the background of both the festive event and the professional and social setting of the physicists. We argue that below the level of comedy a number of characteristic and normally unexpressed aspects of the epistemic culture of the German physics by the end of the nineteen-thirties is treated in the play