According to the classical nineteenth-century ideas dating back to Laplace, a hot body, like a piece of red-hot metal, should give off radiation. It would lose energy in radio waves, the infra-red, visible light, ultra-violet, X-rays and gamma rays, all at the same rate. This would mean not only that we would all die of skin cancer, but also that everything in the universe would be at the same temperature, which clearly it isn’t. However, Planck showed one could avoid this disaster if one gave up the idea that the amount of radiation could have just any value, and said instead that radiation
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