Ars Technica reported on 28 June that Naturwissenschaften, now The Science of Nature, had retracted two Planck essays: "Natural Science and the Real External World" from 1940 and "Meaning and Limits of Exact Science" from 1942, which drew on a 1941 Berlin lecture and also appeared in other forms. Both were philosophical reflections on scientific knowledge, not experimental papers whose results have been overturned.
The problem appears to be modern publishing rules meeting an older publishing world. Ars Technica, citing work by historians Yves Gingras of the University of Quebec in Montreal and Mahdi Khelfaoui of the University of Quebec at Trois-Rivieres, reported that the papers were treated as copyright or duplicate-publication violations, a category often described as self-plagiarism. Gingras and Khelfaoui's arXiv preprint, which has not yet been peer reviewed, argues that automated or semi-automated checks probably applied present-day duplication standards to material that circulated in lectures, booklets, translations and anthologies before scholarly publishing was standardised around today's metadata.
That is a narrower, stranger story than a famous physicist being found wrong. Planck's quantum work remains foundational; the Max Planck Society describes his quantum of action as opening the way to quantum theory. The retractions are instead about how a publisher handles inherited material from a different documentary era, especially when digitisation turns old catalogue ambiguities into machine-readable article status.
The handling is what makes the case more than a curiosity. Ars Technica reported that the article pages now display blank pages and empty PDFs marked withdrawn for an article violation. Science, in a report by Sam Kean, said Springer Nature was still selling the empty PDFs for $39.95. That is a poor way to correct a record: it tells the reader something went wrong, but strips away the context needed to understand what the problem was.
The current editor-in-chief of The Science of Nature, Suzanne Scarlata of Worcester Polytechnic Institute, was not presented by Ars Technica and Science as the author of a deliberate editorial judgement. She told reporters she had not known the papers had been retracted and suggested the decision may have happened through an algorithm. Springer Nature declined to comment, and Science reported that an editorial Scarlata had planned was stopped. The result is a retraction with enough force to erase ordinary access, but not enough explanation to satisfy a historian, librarian or reader.