book_cover_big.gifAround 1900, Planck was an expert in classical thermodynamics and wrote many articles and books about that theory. The concept of entropy especially held his interest, but he published also in the fields of dilute solutions and thermoelectricity. Of course, being a time-oriented fellow, he was familiar with the results of Boltzmann’s works. However, being a physicist of the “old school,” he was raised without having the concept of atoms in his scientific toolkit. In 1891, for instance, he and Ostwald had a discussion with Boltzmann at a conference where Planck stated that thermodynamic methods without the incorporation of atomistic models were sufficient to explain those days’ physical observations. Also, Planck was not very pleased with the statistical approach of Boltzmann [1]. His main objection was that Boltzmann’s statistical approach allowed that the change of entropy for spontaneous processes could become negative (i.e., an entropy decrease), although at an extremely low probability (see Chapter 3 for more details on this topic).

But Planck was wrestling at the turn of the century with understanding black body radiation behavior. Since 1861, when Kirchhoff[2] first described a black body, the radiation behavior was studied and described by a slew of well-known physicists such as Wien, Stefan, and Boltzmann. However, all these attempts led only to a radiation law that had very limited applicability. The breakthrough in Planck’s understanding came when he started to use Boltzmann’s statistical approach. In fact, it was Planck who wrote the current well-known form of the Boltzmann equation, S = k lnW, in his famous 1901 article[3] . It was in this text that Planck proposed that the radiation might consist of small packets (quanten) of size hv. This was the beginning of quantum mechanical theory. Planck struggled a long time with his own thoughts, since they were so in contrast with the classical belief of continuous energy. For some time he saw his quanten approach merely as a mathematical trick, but slowly became convinced that energy in nature was indeed discrete, rather than a continuum. It also took some time before his ideas were accepted in the scientific community[4]. It was no less than Einstein who used the quanta principle to explain the photoelectronic effect, as we will see shortly.

[1] Flamm, Dieter, “Einführung zu Ludwig Boltzmanns Entropy und Wahrscheinlichkeit”, this is an introduction of Entropie und Warscheinlichkeit, 1872-1905 von Ludwig Boltzman in Ostwalds Klassiker der Exakten Wissenschaften, Band 286, Verlag Harri Deutsch, Frankfurt am Main (2000). This book is contains a nice compilation of the most important articles from Boltzmann in original version.

[2] It’s likely that Planck got his interest in black body radiation from Kirchhoff, who was his teacher. In 1889, he succeeded Kirchhoff as professor at the University of Berlin.

[3] Planck, Annalen der Physik 1901

[4] Interestingly, Planck once remarked that a new theory gets accepted not because its opponents become convinced, but because they eventually die and new generations of scientists, unhindered by historic baggage, simply assume the theory is true (provided that it is still supported by experimental facts)!

© Copyright 2009 John Schmitz