The Mystery of the Max Planck Retractions

Update July 8, 2026: Science reports that Springer Nature has restored Planck’s retracted papers and stated that a bot was responsible for the retractions.

Max Planck is one of the best-known physicists of all time. Not only is he considered the father of quantum mechanics, but he won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918 for his work in the field.

Planck’s work is legendary and has been the bedrock for over a century of physics. Despite passing away in 1947, Planck’s work has remained relevant and highly regarded even today.

So imagine the surprise of Yves Gingras, a historian of physics at the University of Quebec, who was perusing Retraction Watch’s list of retractions by Nobel Prize winners and saw that Planck’s name was attached to two separate retractions.

Gingras then reached out to Mahdi Khelfaoui, a fellow historian at the school, to find out what had happened. Now, in a pre-publication posted to arXiv, the two discuss their findings and, while there are few solid answers, they do put forth a reasonable theory that raises serious questions about if when and how we should apply contemporary standards to older works.

In short, it seems likely that the papers were retracted by a bot, one that was either unaware or misunderstood the standards of Planck’s time.

Understanding What Happened

The story deals with two of Planck’s papers. The first was published in 1940, and the second in 1942. Both were published in the journal Naturwissenschaften, a German-language journal which is now owned by Springer Nature and has changed its name to The Science of Nature.

These are also not ordinary retractions. In both cases, the papers themselves have been removed completely. Normally, with a retraction, the original text is still available. Here, the pages have been made blank, and only the sentence, “This article has been widrawn [sic] due to article violation.”

It’s also worth noting that neither of these papers was for any of Planck’s research. These papers were both musings about science and his work more broadly, but were not related to any of his discoveries, theoretical or experimental.

The journal’s current editor-in-chief, Suzanne Scarlata of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, expressed surprise at the retractions. To make matters worse, the journal is currently selling the blank PDFs for $39.95, though, according to reporters, they are easily obtained for free.

Both retractions appear to have taken place in 2011, as the journal was digitizing its archives. That, in turn, is likely the biggest clue as to what happened.

Though there is no definitive answer, especially since there are no details with either of the retractions, the most likely explanation is that a bot pulled the articles due to concerns over duplicative publication or “self-plagiarism.”

This is highlighted by the fact that one of the papers was published in multiple other places, and the other, though not a repeat, shared a title with another of Planck’s writings.

If that’s the case, it’s an honest mistake, but one that raises some serious questions about how we should evaluate older works.

Turning the Battleship

When it comes to citation and other ethical standards, academic publishing is very much akin to “turning the battleship.” Standards, typically, evolve slowly and gradually. 

On one hand, this creates a great deal of consistency and stability. On the other hand, it does mean that the field is slow to respond to new technologies and other changes.

But the idea of recycling, self-plagiarism, and/or duplicative publication is one area where there has been a great deal of change. In Planck’s time, duplicative publication was seen as normal, especially when the work involved different fields or needed to be published in multiple languages.

Simply put, it was the only way to ensure the broadest distribution possible. It was not frowned upon and, at times, was all but mandatory.

However, two things have changed. The first is the internet. Now there’s much less need for multiple publications to reach a global audience. Second, is that publications have become an important metric for researchers that want to be hired or promoted. The rise of “publish or perish” makes it so that duplicative publication is gaming that system.

When you combine those two factors, duplicative publication or self-plagiarism goes from being an acceptable and even necessary practice to something that is gaming the system and taking resources and space away from others in the field.

That says nothing about the issue of copyright. Though academic papers have always been protected by copyright, it’s only been in recent years that there has been a push to enforce those rights.

In 2011, the fear of copyright issues was (and still is) very real. It’s understandable that a bot might pull repeated papers to avoid copyright issues. However, the bot doing it without human oversight is a major problem. 

These papers are most likely in the public domain. There are almost certainly no copyright issues to speak of. One glance by a human would have revealed that.

Bottom Line

The lesson from this is remarkably simple: as useful as automated tools can be at times, relying on them without human oversight is a recipe for disaster. Clearly, that was true in 2011, and the message has only become more relevant since then.

If there ever were a time to retract a retraction, this would likely be it. There was no reason to retract these papers, and it appears that they were done in error and without any (or at the very least grossly inadequate) human oversight.

To be clear, I’m not saying that Planck’s work is beyond reproach. The nature of science makes it so that we have to constantly re-evaluate and challenge the work of the past, regardless of who did it. But this wasn’t a case of bad science or unethical behavior. It was a case of a standard practice from the 1940s being held to modern standards by a bot that didn’t understand the context.

It was an error that, like Planck himself, was remarkably ahead of its time. However, when those papers were published, there were no ethical issues with what Planck did. He was following the standards of his time religiously, and holding him to modern standards that only became relevant long after his death is grossly unfair to both Planck and the historical record.

In the end, I agree with Gingras, who told Science, “Whoever did it, I don’t care. Just put them [back] in the database. Intellectually, it’s not acceptable.”

We owe it to ourselves and to Planck to do that.