Ludwig Boltzmann had used statistics to explain how heat disperses as atoms and molecules collide. Planck found that only by applying the same statistics to oscillating electrons in the cavity resonator’s walls could he derive an equation that accurately matched what was observed. In his historic 1900 paper, Planck acknowledged that he had to introduce “probability considerations into the electromagnetic theory of radiation, the importance of which for the second law of thermodynamics was originally discovered by Mr. L. Boltzmann.”
