Word: quanta
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...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...
...this space time world, interplaying with and complementing that supreme actual occasion, God. This is a cosmology in which there is no place for the hard, colorless, self-sufficient atoms of the past, but which grounds deep and firm the modern view that the fundamental realities are interrelated quanta events in a cosmic space time...
...mathematics, married Charlotte Tiffany Mitchell of the jeweled Tiffanys. In 1910 he went back to Cambridge, turned to astronomy. Always a theoretician rather than an observer, he published formidable papers which won him a reputation among brother scientists. Typical title: The Mathematical Theory of Electricity and Magnetism; Atomicity and Quanta...
...this simple but daring idea developed the supremely important knowledge that energy comes in small, discontinuous "quanta" analogous to the atoms of matter and the electrons of electricity...