Abstract
Twentieth-century physics began with Planck’s postulate, in 1900, that electromagnetic radiation is not continuously absorbed or emitted, but comes in quanta of energy h v,where vis the frequency and hPlanck’s constant. Planck got to this postulate in a complicated way, starting from statistical mechanics. He derived from it his famous law of the spectral distribution of blackbody radiation.
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Bethe, H.A. (1999). Quantum Theory. In: Bederson, B. (eds) More Things in Heaven and Earth. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-1512-7_1
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