Das prinzip der erhaltung der energie

Description

From the intro. of Planck's autobiography:

I soon moved to Kiel, where I put the finishing touches on my paper, and submitted it in Göttingen. It won second prize. Besides my entry, two other papers had been submitted on the subject, but these two were awarded no prize at all. Obviously, I was wondering why my paper had failed to win first prize , and I found the answer in the text of the detailed decision of the Faculty of Göttingen. The judges set forth a few points of criticism of minor import, and then stated: “Finally, the Faculty must withhold its approval from the remarks in which the author tries to appraise Weber’s Law.” Now, the story behind these remarks was: W. Weber was the Professor of Physics in Göttingen, between whom and Helmholtz there existed at the time a vigorous scientific controversy, in which I had expressly sided with the latter. I think that I make no mistake in considering this circumstance to have been the main reason for the decision of the Faculty of Göttingen to withhold the first prize from me. But while with my attitude I had incurred the displeasure of the scholars of Göttingen, it gained me the benevolent attention of those of Berlin, the results of which I was soon to feel.

His prize papers were collected into Das prinzip der erhaltung der energi e (1887), and he does mention Weber in several places, including citing his Elektrodynamische Maßbestimmungen.

Also, Planck was familiar with Duhem: PDF pp. 2-3 of Max Planck, “Ueber Das Princip Der Vermehrung Der Entropie,” Annalen Der Physik 268, no. 11 (1887): 462–503:

In jiingster Zeit hat P. Duhems ein beachtenswerthes Werk herausgegeben, in welchem er, von ahnlichen Gesichtspunkten ausgehend, eine Reihe von Gesetzen uber den Eintritt chemischer Reactionen ableitet. Indess muss ich bemerken, dass Duhem die Allgemeinheit des Entropieprincips nicht erfasst hat.

In recent times P. Duhem has published a noteworthy work in which, from a similar point of view, he derives a series of laws concerning the occurrence of chemical reactions. However, I must say that Duhem did not capture the generality of the entropy principle.