Charles Munger and His Amusing But Aprocryphal Planck Anecdote

Tuesday, December 4th, 2007

I’ve already mentioned that Berkshire Hathaway’s Charles Munger gave a speech at UCSB in 2003 that was chock-full of thought-provoking bits. Here’s an amusing but apocryphal story about Max Planck, the famous physicist:

After he won his prize, he was invited to lecture everywhere, and he had this chauffeur that drove him around to give public lectures all through Germany. And the chauffeur memorized the lecture, and so one day he said, “Gee Professor Planck, why don’t you let me try it as we switch places?” And so he got up and gave the lecture. At the end of it some physicist stood up and posed a question of extreme difficulty. But the chauffeur was up to it. “Well,” he said, “I’m surprised that a citizen of an advanced city like Munich is asking so elementary a question, so I’m going to ask my chauffeur to respond.”

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