“‘Almost everything is already discovered’, a young Max Planck was told in 1874. Planck, who would become one of the greatest scientists of the twentieth century, had travelled to Munich to embark on a career in physics, only to be told by Professor Philipp von Jolly to study something else, as ‘theoretical physics was approaching a degree of completion which geometry had possessed for hundreds of years.'”
Geraint F. Lewis and Luke A. Barnes, A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos (2016), 183
Only a few new developments would occur in physics during Planck’s lifetime, such as general relativity, special relativity, quantum theory, the discovery that the universe is expanding, nuclear fission, and a couple of other details like that.
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