Word: planck
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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...
Triumphant Work. Imbedded in Max Planck's Law of Radiation (published in 1901) was something vastly more important: Planck's "universal constant" (6.624 x 10 -27 erg-seconds), now considered one of the three fundamental figures in the universe.* Planck's constant enabled Einstein to conceive the "photon" (particle of radiation). It also made possible Niels Bohr's model of the atom. It turned up in spectroscopy, in the study of X rays, in electronics. Upon it is based the whole science of quantum (wave) mechanics...