In 1875, when a young German in Kiel named Max Planck was deciding whether to devote his life to mathematics or to physics, he was urged most heartily not to choose physics because the breakthroughs had all been made there. The coming century, he was assured, would be one of consolidation and refinement, not revolution.
1875年，德国基尔有一位名叫马克斯·普朗克的年轻人犹豫不决，不知道这辈子究竟是该从事数学还是该从事物理学。人们由衷地劝他不要选择物理学，因为物理学的重大问题都已得到解决。他们斩钉截铁地告诉他，下个世纪将是个巩固和提高的世纪，不是个革命的世纪。

Planck didn’t listen. He studied theoretical physics and threw himself body and soul into work on entropy, a process at the heart of thermodynamics, which seemed to hold much promise for an ambitious young man. In 1891 Planck produced his results and learned to his dismay that the important work on entropy had in fact been done already, in this instance by a retiring scholar at Yale University named J. Willard Gibbs.
普朗克不听，他钻研理论物理学，潜心投入了热力学的核心问题——熵的研究工作。在一个雄心勃勃的年轻人看来，研究这个问题似乎很有前途。1891年，他做出了成果，却吃惊地发现，关于熵的这项重要工作实际上已经有人做过。他是耶鲁大学一位离群索居的学者，名叫J.威拉德·吉布斯。