Why did this journal retract two 1940s papers by Max Planck?
a bot-ched decision?
Clicking on the links now reveals blank pages and empty PDFs. “Intellectually, it’s not acceptable.”
Max Planck is not amused. Credit: Hugo Erfurth /Public domain
German physicist Max Planck was one of the pioneers of quantum mechanics in the early 20th century, earning the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of quanta. There has never been a whisper of scandal about the man’s integrity or his scientific work. So a pair of science historians were puzzled when they discovered that a scientific journal had inexplicably retracted two of Planck’s papers from the 1940s.
The journal in question is Naturwissenschaften, now known as The Science of Nature. The journal typically adds a large RETRACTED notice across digital papers that have been retracted, leaving them available for download. But it has removed the two Planck papers entirely, leaving just a blank page (and empty PDFs) with...
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