Like everyone else, he struggled with it for years. But, like everyone else, he couldn’t make a model that worked. The ultraviolet catastrophe should have been right up his alley. He was a leading mind in thermodynamics, a branch of physics that defines the relationship between heat and other forms of energy. Unlike most people who remake science, Planck was no hip young thinker: he was in his forties, with a comfortable position at the University of Berlin and a membership in the Prussian Academy. The problem came to be called “ the ultraviolet catastrophe.”Įnter Max Planck. That’s not what’s happening – good news for those who like toast, but bad news for 19th century physics. If each frequency got an equal smear of energy, then the high end of the spectrum would have more energy – and a run-of-the-mill toaster would produce blinding ultraviolet light and deadly X-ray radiation. At the high end of the spectrum, the frequencies are closer together. This seemed reasonable but resulted in a nonsensical prediction. The best scientific models of the day said that the energy of the glow should be smeared evenly across all frequencies. Why should everything at the same temperature emit the same colour light? Physicists love a good phenomenological question, and at the end of the 19th century, this one was all the rage. Heat it to 1,100☌, and it will be yellow. Heat something – embers, glass, clay, steel, the little wire filament in a light bulb, anything – to 800☌, and it will glow red. In fact, all hot things glow in the same way. The first light bulbs were incandescent, which is a physicist’s way of saying that they glow because they are hot, and hot things glow. Old-school bulbs: The dawn of the quantum world In fact, a tour through the history of the light bulb can double as a tour through the history of science, where small puzzles can lead to big breakthroughs and esoteric little observations can – given enough time – light up the whole world. But though we’re learning to harness the quantum properties of the world in new ways, the deeper truth is that the world has always been quantum.Įven that icon of old-school invention – the light bulb – is a quantum technology. When we think quantum technology, we think exotic. Unimaginably powerful quantum computers, unbreakable quantum encryptions, ultraprecise quantum sensors.
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