The Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory

Being the Nobel Prize Address Delivered Before the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences at Stockholm, 2 June, 1920

Max Planck

• Publisher: Left of Brain Books
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781396319297
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Quantum Theory

You may know that the Quantum Theory revolutionized our perception of matter on the atomic scale, but did you know that its founder, Max Planck, himself didn't believe it?

This short read is Planck's address to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences after winning the Nobel prize. He displays how his Quantum Theory came into existence. It was not the result of a single lab experiment and a conclusion, but an inspection of overwhelming evidence from various works of immortal names like Bohr, Hertz, Ostwald, Einstein, and others.

Planck unveils secrets in the scientific community, explains why his own theory was inconceivable to the classical physicist, and first mentions the famous dispute between Quantum Theory and Relativity in this eye-opening book.

"After some weeks of the most intense work of my life, clearness began to dawn upon me, and an unexpected view revealed itself in the distance."

"The quantum would have to play a fundamental role in physics, heralding the advent of a new state of things, destined to transform completely our physical concepts."

~Max Planck

Published by Left of Brain Books

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ISBN 978-1-396-31929-7

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The Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory

My task this day is to present an address dealing with the subjects of my publications. I feel I can best discharge this duty, the significance of which is deeply impressed upon me by my debt of gratitude to the generous founder of this Institute, by attempting to sketch in outline the history of the origin of the Quantum Theory and to give a brief account of the development of this theory and its influence on the Physics of the present day.

When I recall the days of twenty years ago, when the conception of the physical quantum of ‘action’ was first beginning to disentangle itself from the surrounding mass of available experimental facts, and when I look back upon the long and tortuous road which finally led to its disclosure, this development strikes me at times as a new illustration of Goethe’s saying, that ‘man errs, so long as he is striving’. And all the mental effort of an assiduous investigator must indeed appear vain and hopeless, if he does not occasionally run across striking facts which form incontrovertible proof of the truth he seeks, and show him that after all he has moved at least one step nearer to his objective. The pursuit of a goal, the brightness of which is undimmed by initial failure, is an indispensable condition, though by no means a guarantee, of final success.

In my own case such a goal has been for many years the solution of the question of the distribution of energy in the normal spectrum of radiant heat. The discovery by Gustav Kirchhoff that the quality of the heat radiation produced in an enclosure surrounded by any emitting or absorbing bodies whatsoever, all at the same temperature, is entirely independent of the nature of such bodies (1)¹, established the existence of a universal function, which depends only upon the temperature and the wavelength, and is entirely independent of the particular properties of the substance. And the discovery of this remarkable function promised a deeper insight into the relation between energy and temperature, which is the principal problem of thermodynamics and therefore also of the entire field of molecular physics. The only road to this function was to search among all the different bodies occurring in nature, to select one of which the emissive and absorptive powers were known, and to calculate the energy distribution in the heat radiation in equilibrium with that body. This distribution should then, according to Kirchhoff’s law, be independent of the nature of the body.

A most suitable body for this purpose seemed H. Hertz’s rectilinear oscillator (dipole) whose laws of emission for a given frequency he had just then fully developed (2). If a number of such oscillators be distributed in an enclosure surrounded by reflecting walls, there would take place, in analogy with sources and resonators in case of sound, an exchange of energy by means of the emission and reception of electro-magnetic waves, and finally what is known as black body radiation corresponding to Kirchhoff’s law should establish itself in the vacuum-enclosure. I expected, in a way which certai...

Table of contents

• The Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory
• Notes