What if “Quanta”?

Max Planck displays the best ideals of science, an exemplar of Kuhn’s “normal scientist”: humble, focused, and dogged. These are qualities that led him to first suggest, in 1900, that bodies emit electromagnetic energy in discrete “quanta”. And it was indeed little more than a suggestion, “a purely formal assumption”, made after some twenty years of struggle to solve the blackbody problem. This whisper of “what if ... quanta?” started the avalanche which was the enormous scientific revolution of the 20th century.

In the talk, I briefly review the blackbody problem and some of the admirable qualities of Planck’s character that led to the resolution of this problem. I quickly skate across the arc of time from 1880 to 1900, from Planck’s school days when there was a complacent sense that “physics is complete”, through years of mounting tension as refinements in theory and experiment increasingly hinted that maybe physics wasn’t so complete, to the famous “two clouds” speech — Lord Kelvin’s Nineteenth century clouds over ... heat and light, delivered the same year as Planck suggested quanta.


The material here is not new. Rather, I celebrate the life of Max Planck, and his humble and intuitively brilliant suggestion of, “what if quanta?” What if, indeed, Mr. Planck.