Robert McNees
Physicist Max Planck was born #OTD in 1858.
With some lucky intuition* he managed to glue together the Rayleigh-Jeans Law and Wien's Law by assuming that energy is emitted and absorbed by matter only in discrete chunks.
Planck's hypothesis averted what Ehrenfest later called the "ultraviolet catastrophe," and set physicists on the road to Quantum Mechanics.
* "Lucky intuition" was how Planck referred to it.
Robert McNees
Here's a thread from this past Quantum Day about Planck's work, evidence for the reality of quanta, how it was actually Planck who introduced "Boltzmann's constant," and physicists gradually dropping the term "quanta" in favor of "chonks."
Robert McNees
@arclight Immediate urge to avoid whatever it is.
arclight
@mcnees Out of all of modern physics, my favorite phrase is "ultraviolet catastrophe". It's like the most genius story prompt, except for physicists.
Robert McNees
@bertwells Yes, that is correct. "Lucky intuition" was the term he used, but in fact he regarded it as a mere calculation trick. He thought (at least for a while) that the discreteness was simply a way of encoding more complicated physics about the emission/absorption process that wasn't yet understood.
Righteous Hazard
@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.
OddOpinions5
I'm not a physicist, but love this supposed MP quote
It isn't that old scientists learn new things; it is that old scientists die off and young ones are not taught the errors of the past
Robert McNees
@failedLyndonLaRouchite Oh that's great, do you have a source?
Chirp! is a social network. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.1-beta0, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All Chirp! content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.