passage describing Planck’s use of a discrete energy distribution for purposes of calculation

Notices where this attachment appears

1. Righteous Hazard (bertwells@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Sunday, 23-Apr-2023 17:03:23 UTC Righteous Hazard

   in reply to

   @mcnees I recently read Emilio Segre’s book X-Rays to Quarks which is fairly well sourced history, and he makes a pretty compelling case that Planck did not make an intuitive leap, but was intitially seeking a calculation trick. In this passage, Segre claims that Plancks sole aim was representing the distribution discretely to obtain an average energy, then taking a limit to recover the continuous distribution.
   Segre also documents Planck’s diffidence and resistance to his own idea.