Word: planck
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...author of the quantum theory lived long enough to see his discovery affect all branches of science and all human life. Last week Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck, 89, one of history's greatest discoverers, died...
...Planck was born in Kiel, Germany, in 1858, and grew up in the placid, self-satisfied world of 19th Century physics. He became a professor at the University of Kiel, married the daughter of a Munich banker, played the piano and composed music, lived the good intellectual life of Germany's pre-World War I golden age. Outwardly, he did not appear to be a world-shaking revolutionist...
...Planck's particular specialty, thermodynamics (the behavior of heat), there was a "revolutionary situation." Planck (and many others) had been studying the effect of a body's temperature upon the wavelengths of the light and heat which it radiates. They suspected that a fundamental relationship was lurking somewhere, but could not find...
...Planck attacked the problem in a new way and arrived at a revolutionary idea that shook the world of physics: that energy is actually radiated in small packages, not continuously, as everybody thought...
...photon (smallest unit of radiant energy) is equal to the frequency of the wave multiplied by Planck's constant h (6.55 X 10(-27)erg-seconds...