Max Planck, a Nobel Prize-winning German physicist, founded quantum theory in 1900, launching a revolution in physics. He introduced the idea of quantization, representing light as discrete packets called photons. Planck’s constant led to the derivation of fundamental units based on the properties of the universe.
Max Planck was a Nobel Prize-winning German physicist. He lived from 1858 to 1947, dying at the age of 89. Credited with founding quantum theory in 1900, Planck is, along with Albert Einstein, considered one of the most significant physicists of the 20th century. His work on quantum theory launched a revolution in physics that continued into the 1920s.
Max Planck worked as a professor at the University of Berlin from 1892 until his retirement in 1926 and had a reputation as a conservative thinker. In 1894, he began to focus on problems surrounding black-body radiation, the intrinsic spectrum of colors emitted when a non-reflective object is heated. He was commissioned to work on this problem by electric companies who were looking for ways to build light bulbs that produced the most light with the least amount of energy.
Trying to discover the physics of light, Max Planck got confused. Until 1900 everyone thought that light was a continuous stream, indivisible down to the smallest level. Planck was a conservative thinker and generally relied on accepted wisdom, but his calculations were confused by representing light as continuous. Using Ludwig Boltzmann’s statistical interpretation of the second law of thermodynamics as a basis, Planck introduced the idea of quantization, which represents light as discrete packets that would later be called photons. Later, when asked about this decision, he called it “an act of desperation… I was ready to sacrifice any previous beliefs I had about physics.”
In Max Planck’s model of light, electromagnetic energy was to be emitted at discrete energy levels, multiples of a unit E, which was the product of the frequency of the radiation and a natural unit known as Planck’s constant. In fact, we now know that light rays with higher frequencies and shorter wavelengths, such as X-rays, carry more energy than lower frequencies such as visible light and radio waves.
From Planck’s constant, physicists were able to derive a number of fundamental units, based not on human decision, but on the fundamental properties of the universe. Often, these numbers represent the largest or smallest possible value that makes sense according to our current physical theory. For example, at Planck length, many times smaller than a proton, and Planck time, an incredibly small unit, our understanding of quantum physics ceases to make sense. At the Planck temperature, many trillion times greater than the temperature at the center of the Sun, all the fundamental forces of nature would come together and symmetries would break after the Big Bang. Planck’s speed is equivalent to the speed of light, and so on. When Max Planck discovered all these fundamental units, our understanding of the universe became much more digital.
Protect your devices with Threat Protection by NordVPN
