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Comment by crdrost | Hacker News Reader

I would be very interested to read this. I found one comment in the abstract a little bit off-putting:

> Planck did not consider this a quantization, but merely a mathematical trick to be able to calculate the entropy of the oscillators.

My understanding was that Planck absolutely understood that his approach would have been a mathematical trick if he took the limit h → 0, but that in stopping at a nonzero small number he was explicitly aware that he was saying something peculiar about the energies in the system, and had strayed far away from that realm of pure mathematics into something that we would today effortlessly identify as quantum, even if that word did not exist at the time.

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Often, when inventing something new - it can be difficult to assess how novel the "new" thing is. Particularly when there isn't yet a word for it. Planck may have simply believed that this hinted towards something equivalent of an "atom" of light. Atom's were after all a relatively recent discovery in 1827, why couldn't you have an atom-like construct for light? and why would light atoms be any different regular atoms?

While we now know a great deal about this topic - placing such speculation in a paper would be problematic. Hypothesizing that such quantizations are common for other quantities would be even more problematic.

EDIT: Removed eroneous mention of michelson-moorly instead of milikan oil drop experiment.

I think you mean the Millikan oil drop experiment.

... Since Michelson-Morley was supposed to show the relative speed of the Earth through the ether, but instead showed there was no ether at all.

:doh: good catch :facepalm: it's been too long since physics undergrad.

Even though this is tangential, I think it's important to note that this experiment should be called as the Millikan-Fletcher oil drop experiment to acknowledge Harvey Fletcher's contribution to this experiment as a grad student which he was coerced into relinquishing to receive his PhD

For any who wish to read about this:

My work with Millikan on the oil-drop experiment - https://web.archive.org/web/20160128151252/http://www.cce.uf...

The question of whether light is a particle or a wave dates back to at least Newton (who thought it was a particle) and Hyugens (who thought it was a wave). By the end of the 19th century, before Einstein brought up the photoelectric effect, the consensus opinion was pretty firmly on the "wave" side of the dispute, and apparently Planck was not an outlier. See another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39349027

> Atom's were after all a relatively recent discovery in 1827

Atoms were controversial well past that. Their existence was not definitively settled until Einstein's work on Brownian motion in the early 20th century (which, incidentally, is what he won the Nobel Prize for, not relativity — Update: turns out I got that wrong. See child comment.). The controversy around the atomic theory was so intense it drove Ludwig Boltzmann to suicide [1].

[1] https://paperpile.com/blog/ludwig-boltzmann/

Nit pick: Einstein was awarded the Nobel for the photoelectric effect. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1921/summary/

(I think he could have won it for the theory of Brownian motion too!)

I stand corrected :-)

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