The Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory

by Max Planck

From "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 signi?cance 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 in?uence 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 ?rst beginning to disentangle itself from the surrounding mass of available experimental facts, and when I look back upon the long and tortuous road which ?nally 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 efort 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 ?nal 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 Kirchhof 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 wave-length, 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 ?eld of molecular physics. The only road to this function was to search among all the diferent 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 Kirchhof’s law, be independent of the nature of the body. "

Genres: Science, Physics, Classics, Nonfiction, German Literature, Stem

28 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 1, 2009

About the author

Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck was a German theoretical physicist who originated quantum theory, which won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918.

Planck made many contributions to theoretical physics, but his fame rests primarily on his role as originator of the quantum theory. This theory revolutionized human understanding of atomic and subatomic processes, just as Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity revolutionized the understanding of space and time. Together they constitute the fundamental theories of 20th-century physics.

Reviews

[Pardis TD · Rating 4 out of 5]

Generally his calculations were pretty accurate for his time, he is a quantum theorist after all.

[Forked Radish · Rating 4 out of 5]

Archaic physics of the latter Dark Ages. Determinism still reins in a fairyland of laws, waves, constants and fields. But at least Maxwell's electromagnetic radiation theory and consequently "the classical theory of interference phenomena" is trashed.

[Galicius · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is Max Planck's speech before the Nobel Committee in 1920 when he was awarded the prize.