Abstract
In the second half of the 19th century the world of classical physics was still in order. This was spelled out by the physicist Philipp von Jolly who in 1874 advised the young Max Planck against studying theoretical physics (Planck M in Wege zur physikalischen Erkenntnis: Reden und Vorträge. Verlag S Hirzel, Leipzig, 1933): “Physics is a highly developed and nearly fully matured science ...There may still be a speck of dust or a vesicle here and there that needs investigation but the system as a whole is rather well established. Theoretical physics notably approaches the degree of perfection that geometry for instance has been enjoying for centuries.”
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Notes
- 1.
Translation from the original German by the author.
- 2.
Soddy: “Rutherford, this is transmutation!”; Rutherford: “Don’t call it transmutation. They’ll have our heads off as alchemists.” (Cited in Howorth 1958).
- 3.
Integrating the spectral density over all frequencies, one obtains the total energy density of the black body.
- 4.
As a reminder, frequency \(\nu \) and wave length \(\lambda \) satisfy the relation \(\lambda \nu = c\) where c is the speed of light.
- 5.
Physical units and the notation for numerical values are explained in Appendix A. Unless specified otherwise, all numerical values in this book are taken from the Review of Particle Properties (Tanabashi et al. 2018).
- 6.
Instead of light quanta, Arthur Compton propagated the name photons proposed by the physical chemist Gilbert Lewis in 1926.
- 7.
A detailed discussion can be found in Okun (1989).
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Ecker, G. (2019). Physics Around 1900. In: Particles, Fields, Quanta. Undergraduate Lecture Notes in Physics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14479-1_2
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