Pith Number

pith:CECSW5NN

pith:2026:CECSW5NNHEK2BNTNTHZL3N7JJO

not attested not anchored not stored refs resolved

The Curious Case of Max Planck retracted papers. When past scientific practices meet contemporary publishing norms

Mahdi Khelfaoui, Yves Gingras

Max Planck's 1940s republications of his essays followed standard practices of the time and should not be judged by modern rules against duplicate publication.

arxiv:2605.17534 v1 · 2026-05-17 · cs.DL · physics.hist-ph · physics.soc-ph

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\usepackage{pith}
\pithnumber{CECSW5NNHEK2BNTNTHZL3N7JJO}

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Record completeness

1 Bitcoin timestamp

2 Internet Archive

3 Author claim open · sign in to claim

4 Citations open

5 Replications open

✓ Portable graph bundle live · download bundle · merged state

The bundle contains the canonical record plus signed events. A mirror can host it anywhere and recompute the same current state with the deterministic merge algorithm.

Claims

C1strongest claim

Contemporary notions such as duplicate publication and self-plagiarism are historically situated categories that cannot be applied retrospectively without distorting the historical record.

C2weakest assumption

That republication of Planck's 1940 and 1942 philosophical essays across multiple formats was a common and legitimate practice within the scientific publishing culture of the early 20th century, as shown by the investigation of their circulation history.

C3one line summary

The apparent retractions of Max Planck's 1940 and 1942 papers result from anachronistic copyright and bibliometric procedures rather than scientific misconduct.

References

25 extracted · 25 resolved · 1 Pith anchors

[1] 1 The Curious Case of Max Planck’s “retracted” papers. When past scientific practices meet contemporary publishing norms Yves Gingras (gingras.yves@uqam.ca), Université du Québec à Montréal Mahdi Khel 1940

[2] The fact that no clear explanation was provided and that the corresponding pages had been left blank, was intriguing. As the historian John Heilbron wrote in his major biography of the German physicis 1900

[3] or even that there were good reasons to retract them later. Rather, we suspected that we were dealing with a recent and anachronistic decision of the journal’s publisher, based 2 on a misunderstanding 1992

[4] The text circulated in several forms between 1941 and 1941

[5] Originally delivered as a lecture at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft in Berlin in November 1941, it was published the following year as a booklet in Leipzig by the editor Johann Ambrosius Barth (Planc 1941

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-05-20T00:04:44.457579Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

11052b75ad3915a0b66d99f2bdb7e94b8257ae3021dfd071222101661b218df4

Aliases

arxiv: 2605.17534 · arxiv_version: 2605.17534v1 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2605.17534 · pith_short_12: CECSW5NNHEK2 · pith_short_16: CECSW5NNHEK2BNTN · pith_short_8: CECSW5NN

Agent API

Resolver JSON Graph JSON Events JSON Schema Signing key

Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/CECSW5NNHEK2BNTNTHZL3N7JJO \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: 11052b75ad3915a0b66d99f2bdb7e94b8257ae3021dfd071222101661b218df4

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "3453a7b19155b2975c7a63dad88e030fbab54f458eb41b19957a91071476c03f",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [
      "physics.hist-ph",
      "physics.soc-ph"
    ],
    "license": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/",
    "primary_cat": "cs.DL",
    "submitted_at": "2026-05-17T16:38:32Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "b2a2780118c6ee4bf697cfc40221dc87a9427e9433424539e77f654b303f0d3c"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2605.17534",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 1
  }
}