Quote Originally Posted by Northstar View Post
To be fair, almost anyone can work their way to degrees (yes, even PhD, it's just grueling work), but I find it hard to believe a type with 1-2D intuitive and 1-2D logic functions would have revolutionarized subatomic physics.
He didn't set out to revolutionize Physics. At that time, thermodynamic calculations were predicting that the partition distribution of energy in a stable state would lead to something called the "ultraviolet catastrophe". Unlimited energy at shorter and shorter wavelengths.

Planck was screwing around with the equations for the energy distribution law and discovered that if the energy packets were discrete, rather than continuous, that the resulting energy per wavelength matched what was measured. It was a result of dogged fooling around with equations, not a brilliant insight into how the Universe works.

For a long time, he didn't believe that what he had discovered had much significance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Planck