Why have papers by one of history’s most famous physicists been retracted?
Springer Nature has removed two studies by Max Planck. A bot may be to blame
- 25 Jun 2026
- 4:00 PM ET
- By Sam Kean
Pioneering physicist Max Planck had two papers retracted decades after his death for reasons that remain mysterious.Bettman via Getty Images
The link was too juicy not to click.
In early May, Yves Gingras, a historian of physics at the University of Quebec (UQ) at Montreal, was browsing Retraction Watch, a website that catalogs fraud, data manipulation, and other scientific sins. He noticed a link that read, “ Retractions by Nobel Prize winners.” Were there really Nobel laureates whose papers had been withdrawn from the scientific literature?
After clicking, Gingras froze. “That’s impossible,” he recalls thinking. The fourth name on the list, with two retracted papers, was Max Planck—a legendary pioneer of quantum mechanics and the 1918 Nobel laureate in physics. Gingras had never heard a whiff of scandal about Planck, who was almost as widely revered for his character as his physics. In 1933, for example, he bravely confronted Adolf Hitler over Nazi Germany’s discriminatory laws against Jews.
Gingras called up Mahdi Khelfaoui, a fellow historian of science at UQ Trois-Rivières. “There’s something fishy,” Gingras said. The papers, both quietly retracted in 2011, originally appeared in the early 1940s in Naturwissenschaften, a German journal now owned by publishing giant Springer Nature. After some sleuthing, Khelfaoui determined one of the Planck pieces, a philosophical essay from 1942 titled “Sinn und Grenzen der exakten Wissenschaft” (“Meaning and Limits of Exact Science”), about how to achieve certainty in scientific knowledge, had also appeared in two other journals and been reprinted twice in books. Repackaging the same work multiple times is considered “self-plagiarism” and frowned upon today—the practice produces copyright conflicts and inflates scholars’ publication records. The Naturwissenschaften site gives “copyright violation” as the reason for the retraction.
Yet publishing identical material in multiple journals was widespread before the internet. “Science was more fragmented” then, Khelfaoui says. “You wanted different audiences … to have access to your work.” The practice was especially common for luminaries like Planck. Albert Einstein did the same (but escaped retractions).
Springer Nature’s “anachronistic” application of modern standards to a 1942 paper “distort[s] the historical record,” Gingras and Khelfaoui argue in a preprint posted last month on arXiv. Any concerns about copyright violations are largely moot anyway: Because Planck died in 1947, his works are in the public domain in most countries.
Gingras was especially incensed that Springer Nature deviated from the normal practice of merely slapping the word RETRACTED across the digital version of the paper while still allowing scholars to read the text. Instead, the publisher posted a blank white page with the cryptic phrase, “This article has been withdrawn due to article violation.” Springer Nature is nevertheless still selling the empty PDF for $39.95.
Suzanne Scarlata, a chemist and biochemist at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute and editor-in-chief of The Science of Nature, as Naturwissenschaften is now known, had not heard about the retractions before being contacted for this story. “That’s crazy,” she says, “I don’t understand why they were flagged.”
Scarlata suspects Springer Nature’s internal policing software removed the paper and posted the retraction notice unilaterally, without human supervision: “I think it just happened with their algorithm,” she says. “It’s a mistake they should probably rectify.”
Representatives from Springer Nature declined to comment, beyond saying that “detailed information about specific retractions is usually confidential and can only be shared with the relevant authors.” The company also nixed an editorial that Scarlata planned to write about the retractions.
The retraction of the second Planck paper, published in 1940, left Gingras and Khelfaoui even more baffled. It also cited copyright violation—yet the piece had never appeared elsewhere. Then Khelfaoui noticed something that added to suspicions that an algorithm was at work.
Starting in the 1920s, physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg promoted the so-called Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, which proposes that subatomic particles exist in a strange superposition of multiple states and only cohere into definite form when observed or measured—as in the famous Schrödinger’s cat paradox. Planck opposed this notion, arguing that external reality existed beyond human measurements.
In November 1940, philosopher Aloys Müller criticized Planck’s views in a Naturwissenschaften piece titled “Naturwissenschaft und reale Außenwelt” (“Natural Science and the Real External World”). A month later, Planck responded in print—and used the exact same title. This, Gingras and Khelfaoui suspect, caused Springer Nature’s copyright bot to retract the paper as plagiarism decades later, even though the contents of the two essays differ markedly.
The debate over the Copenhagen interpretation remains active today, which explains why Gingras and Khelfaoui find the retractions so troubling: A key scientist’s views on an important controversy have been memory holed.
Both Scarlata and Gingras are concerned that papers by less prominent scientists have disappeared as well without anyone realizing. At a minimum, Gingras wants Planck’s papers restored. “Whoever did it, I don’t care,” he says, “just put them [back] in the database. Intellectually, it’s not acceptable.”
doi: 10.1126/science.zwsaifa
