Max Planck : the reluctant revolutionary

ACCORDING to the standard story, which is unfortunately still found in many physics textbooks, quantum theory emerged when it was realized that classical physics predicts an energy distribution for black-body radiation that disagrees violently with that found experimentally. In the late 1890s, so the story continues, the German physicist Wilhelm Wien developed an expression that corresponded reasonably well with experiment — but had no theoretical foundation. When Lord Rayleigh and James Jeans then analysed black-body radiation from the perspective of classical physics, the resulting spectrum differed drastically from both experiment and the Wien law. Faced with this grave anomaly, Max Planck looked for a solution, during the course of which he was forced to introduce the notion of "energy quanta". With the quantum hypothesis, a perfect match between thecredited for being the first person t0 reaNze that the ory and experiment was obtained. Voila! Quantum theory was born. The story is a myth, closer to a fairytale than to historical truth. Quantum theory did not owe its origin to any failure of classical physics, but instead to Planck's profound insight in thermodynamics.