The day he was born Quantum Mechanics (ћ)
To quote Max Planck:
The outside world is something independent from man, something absolute, and the search for the laws that describe the way I think the most sublime scientific goal in life.
In 1900 there were two empirical laws to describe the radiation emitted by a black body. The first was the so-called Wien's law that for a fixed temperature, correctly described the experimental results at high frequencies. The second was the Rayleigh-Jeans explaining the results for low frequencies. There was no single law can properly describe the radiation emitted by a black body for all frequencies: the puzzle was served and was Planck who solved it. Planck's originality was to find a formula that correctly describe the known results that were valid for all temperatures and all frequency. The price was to introduce a new constant in physics: Planck's constant, h, which characterizes all processes of quantum mechanics. (Today it is more common to take this constant divided by 2 pi and call ћ.) Planck found, using their own words
eine glücklich erratene Interpolationsformel
(a happy interpolation formula)
The time and on the birth quantum mechanics can be deducted from different accounts of the people involved. It seems that on the night of October 7, 1900 Rubens, one of the great experimental physicists of the time, Planck visited at home and showed new results of greater precision in black body radiation carried out by him in collaboration with Kurlbaum. These results strongly called Planck's attention and it is known that night, guessed the correct formula for a card the same day that Planck wrote to Rubens. Planck worked in depth on his discovery until you are able to submit an article to the scientific community. Two months later, on December 14, 1900, Planck was sufficiently sure of his findings and sent to publish the article symbolically fixing the birth of quantum mechanics. The nineteenth century ended with a crack in classical physics that would be all an abyss. In no time, new experiences fully confirmed Planck's law and became a pressing need to justify it. Planck himself took care of the problem and in 1911, Solvay submitted to Congress show that the formula could be deduced from first principles if one assumed that the energy of vibration of a given frequency electromagnetic field was not amount may vary continuously, but could only take values \u200b\u200bthat were multiples of Planck's constant multiplied by the frequency of the wave.
While it is a commonplace to reduce the birth of quantum mechanics to the night of October 7, 1900 in which Planck intuit the need for constant h, is amazing to see how science always proceeds from the exchange of information followed small individual reflection.
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