Word: planck
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...Dice in the Cosmos. Einstein was convinced that the cosmos is an orderly, continuous unity: gravity and electro-magnetism must, therefore, have a common source. He was in a minority, for Planck's famed Quantum Theory, which Einstein himself did so much to develop, and which many modern scientists accept, suggests that the physical universe is made up of small particles (quanta) that are governed not by some orderly causality but by chance...
Cornell's Peter Debye, 68, Nobel Prize-winning chemist and physicist, author of the Debye theory of the specific heat of solids. Born in The Netherlands, Debye succeeded Einstein as professor of theoretical physics at the University of Zurich, served as director of Berlin's Max Planck Institute until the Nazis drove him out ("Stay at home and occupy yourself by writing a book," they told him), in 1940 finally made his way to Cornell. There, perpetually wreathed in cigar smoke, he pioneered in high polymer research, taught Cornellmen their chemistry, and each year managed to make them...
...time this was frivolity, almost like saying that a railroad train moves in one-foot jumps. But as soon as Planck made his daring assumption, his equations came to heel, describing the emission of radiant energy with elegant precision...
Here was something important, but Planck did not realize it. For years he worked to eliminate the frivolous jumps of energy. They refused to get out of the picture; when Planck made light flow smoothly, his equations would not work. At last he accepted the jumps as actually existing. He named them "quanta" and found that they vary in size with the frequency of the light. Then he wrote his famous equation. Said Planck: "One quantum of energy equals 'h' times the frequency of light...
Mighty Constant. To laymen "h" (Planck's constant) is a tiny number (.000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 006 6 . . .), but it shook the scientific world. The little quanta of energy are the building stones of the universe, far more fundamental than big, clumsy atoms or even protons or electrons. Out of their discovery grew Einstein's relativity, including his historic proof, not then considered fraught with danger to civilization, that matter is equivalent to energy. Out of it grew Niels Bohr's description of the atom as a sort of sun surrounded by electron...