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The Ultraviolet Myth

211 pointsby Lucover 1 year ago

19 comments

stracerover 1 year ago
This particular part of &quot;physicist&#x27;s history of physics&quot; about quantization and Planck&#x27;s work, promulgated by some sources, is well-known to be a false account of history and motivations, and has been criticized in mainstream literature before, e.g. by Helge Kragh [1] (and probably by many others). The present authors apparently are not aware of this, which makes me suspicious that they did not do their homework on this topic...<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dept.math.lsa.umich.edu&#x2F;~krasny&#x2F;math156_article_planck.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dept.math.lsa.umich.edu&#x2F;~krasny&#x2F;math156_article_plan...</a>
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alecstover 1 year ago
It&#x27;s so interesting. This isn&#x27;t the only paper written about this, because I actually came across this same idea last month in a much older paper. Here&#x27;s an extract from it:<p>&gt; It might have been thought, by some scientists in the 1890&#x27;s, that refined mathematical analysis of this kind would play a role in resolving the fundamental problems of classical physics associated with the apparent failures of the equipartition theorem. But that is not what happened.<p>&gt; Although the quantum hypothesis did dispose of the paradox of specific heats of polyatomic gases, and eliminated the possibility that ether-vibrations (having an infinite number of degrees of freedom) would drain an indefinite amount of energy out of material systems at any finite temperature, these were not the anomalies that provoked the introduction of the quantum hypothesis in the first place. Max Planck was not one of the physicists who worried about the validity of the equipartition theorem before 1900, and the myth that his distribution law for blackbody radiation was concocted merely to escape from an &quot;ultraviolet catastrophe&quot; predicted by the Rayleigh-Jeans law has now been thoroughly demolished. It was Paul Ehrenfest who invented the ultraviolet catastrophe (eleven years after the publication of Rayleigh&#x27;s and Planck&#x27;s papers in 1900) in order to dramatize what would have been the consequences of the equipartition theorem if it had been valid for all classical dynamical systems (though neither Rayleigh nor Planck believed that it was).<p>I have this saved as a note, but can&#x27;t find the exact source atm. Here&#x27;s another source though, from the 60s:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sci-hub.ru&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;doi.org&#x2F;10.1007&#x2F;BF00327765" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sci-hub.ru&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;doi.org&#x2F;10.1007&#x2F;BF00327765</a>
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prof-dr-irover 1 year ago
This paper is nice but appears to stretch its result quite a bit.<p>First, the authors make a general claim about &quot;most physics textbooks&quot; without providing a single example. I think one will often encounter more nuanced statements in the better and more widely used textbooks.<p>And I think the paper sorely lacks evidence for the general claim in the concluding sentence: &quot;The idea that physics progress through a series of crisis, is hard to defend.&quot; Not only do they present only a single example, but even in that case one could claim that the &quot;crisis&quot; started <i>after</i> the discovery of Planck&#x27;s formula! After all, it fitted the data supremely well but required this mystery constant: h.<p>It took physicist a quarter century to resolve the deeper meaning of Planck&#x27;s constant. If that was not a crisis in physics then I do not know what would qualify as one.
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bjornsingover 1 year ago
I have a masters degree in physics from a Swedish university, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard the “myth”.<p>But the actual story as described in the paper is vaguely familiar. Before reading it my mind wandered to Einstein and quantization of light.<p>Is this mainly a US myth perhaps?
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adtacover 1 year ago
Douglas Hofstader has a talk on this topic called &quot;Albert Einstein on Light; Light on Albert Einstein&quot; that I often revisit: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ePA1zq56J1I" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ePA1zq56J1I</a> (watch 10:30 to 12:00 if you&#x27;re pressed for time, but I recommend the whole thing)
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sgdpkover 1 year ago
To be fair, I was taught exactly what this paper claims in my Physics degree. Although I was also taught what they call the &quot;myth&quot; in other classes.
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photochemsynover 1 year ago
Pedagogically, this is an argument against teaching physics using the historical development model. You end up with post hoc arguments and simplified narratives, and I think it it just makes life harder for undergraduate students. Maybe &#x27;history of science&#x27; should be its own subject?<p>Some textbooks (e.g. Molecular Quantum Mechanics, Atkins &amp; Friedman) take a more nuanced view. They present failures of classical calculations of the heat capacity of solids near absolute zero side by side with blackbody radiation:<p>&gt; &quot;Einstein recognized the similarity between this problem and black-body radiation, for if each atomic oscillator required a certain minimum energy before it would actively oscillate, then at low temperatures some would be inactive and the heat capacity would be smaller than expected.&quot;<p>Debye improved the theory by allowing atoms to oscillate with different frequencies. So looking back, one can say matter appears to be quantized, and this shows up at low temperatures, and radiation appears to be quantized, and this shows up at high frequencies - which is a nice symmetric argument, visible in hindsight, that probably helps students grasp the concept of the quantized harmonic oscillator (and why they need to learn about it).<p>One major development was Bose deriving Planck&#x27;s radiation law using quantum statisical arguments (and no classical physics), with further development by Einstein c. 1924 - but this might be a difficult place to start from, teaching-wise.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bose%E2%80%93Einstein_statistics" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bose%E2%80%93Einstein_statisti...</a>
lewtunover 1 year ago
The myth is also promoted in Chapter 3 of The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes:<p>&gt; Plank had taught at Berlin since 1889. In 1900 he had proposed a revolutionary idea to explain a persistent problem in mechanical physics, the so-called ultraviolet catastrophe
fsmvover 1 year ago
This video talks about this story and in particular acknowledges that it was called the ultraviolet catastrophe after Plank <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;gXeAp_lyj9s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;gXeAp_lyj9s</a>
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demondemidiover 1 year ago
Funny I spent Sunday afternoon watching youtubers talk about this and they all pretty much said that the catastrophe predated Plank&#x27;s corrections (or caused them). Is this wrong, or is it just pedantic?<p>Most importantly, is the wikipedia page correct:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ultraviolet_catastrophe" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ultraviolet_catastrophe</a>
lowbloodsugarover 1 year ago
Never heard of this, despite a physics degree. Is this what happens after social media is invented and all sorts of bullshit is spread as fact?
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sho_hnover 1 year ago
As a physics layman, I learned his part of history from the book &quot;Quantum&quot; by Manjit Kumar, which as far as I can tell got the Planck bit right and covered his black body work correctly, FWIW.<p>It was a good read.
mcnamaratwover 1 year ago
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Rayleigh–Jeans_law" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Rayleigh–Jeans_law</a>
adrian_bover 1 year ago
Besides the myth busted in this paper, that the actually later work of Rayleigh could have influenced Planck, there is another incorrect myth, that Planck has introduced the &quot;constant of Planck&quot; in his publication from 1900, where he presented the deduction of the Planck formula from the supposition that the emission and absorption of electromagnetic radiation are quantized.<p>This frequently seen claim is also wrong. Planck has introduced the constant of Planck and he has also computed its value with excellent precision for that time (4% relative error) in an earlier work published in 1899:<p>Max Planck, &quot;Ueber irreversible Strahlungsvorgaenge&quot;, &quot;Sitzungsberichte der koeniglich preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin. Jahrgang 1899&quot;, pp. 440-480.<p>There Max Planck has presented deductions of the formulae previously established by Wien for the blackbody radiation, where he replaced the empirical constants of Wien with functions of other universal constants and of the new universal constant introduced by him.<p>Already Maxwell, a quarter of century earlier, had shown that it is possible to determine the units for all physical quantities with a single arbitrary choice (in his example, the wavelength of the yellow light emitted by sodium vapor).<p>In 1899, Planck has shown that the law of blackbody radiation provides an additional relationship between the units of length, time and energy, which, together with the previous relationships considered by Maxwell, can determine the units of all physical quantities without any arbitrary choice.<p>So at the end of this work from 1899, where the constant of Planck has been introduced, he has also presented the system of natural units known now as the Planck units.<p>Nevertheless, the system of Planck units cannot be used as the base of a practical system of units, because the uncertainty of measuring the Newtonian constant of gravitation is huge. This makes useless one of the equations that connect the units of length, time and energy.<p>Because of that, any practical system of units must contain a single arbitrary choice of a unit, which in the case of SI is the frequency of a certain hyperfine transition of the cesium-133 atom, while all the other units result from this choice by adopting conventional values for the universal constants, except for the Newtonian constant of gravitation, which must be measured experimentally (some constant determining the intensity of the electromagnetic interaction, e.g. the fine structure constant, must also be measured experimentally, but for that the uncertainty is extremely low).<p>BTW, another extremely frequent incorrect claim about the constant of Planck is that it is a quantum of action. This is very wrong, it is a quantum of angular momentum (the ratio between energy and frequency is an angular momentum, like also the ratio between their integrals, i.e. between action and plane angle). The origin of the mistake is the fact that many follow the suggestions of the recent SI brochures (there was a resolution adopted by vote that the unit of plane angle is not a base unit, which is equivalent with establishing by vote that 2 + 2 = 5), and they omit the unit of plane angle in the dimensional formulae, in which case it appears that the unit of action is the same with the unit of angular momentum, but they are not the same, as any attempt to change the unit used for plane angles would demonstrate, e.g. between radians and degrees or cycles.<p>The original constant of Planck corresponds to plane angles measured in cycles, while the so-called h bar is the same constant converted to correspond with plane angles measured in radians.
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pbj1968over 1 year ago
The Planck institute sent some borderline animal to my city where he proceeded to criticize everything and everyone he saw. He directed some blah blah department under their purview. Completely unimpressed here.
btillyover 1 year ago
Yet another example where it is tempting to retrofit a modern understanding onto a historical debate. We&#x27;re tempted to do this because when you&#x27;re embedded to the modern worldview, it is hard to remember that others were once possible. And it is tempting to believe that history was a straight arrow to modern truths. In fact it was seldom such a straight path.<p>Kuhn complained about this in <i>The Structure of Scientific Revolutions</i>. When trying to teach the history of science to scientists, you have to work to get them to stop trying to think the &quot;correct&quot; way, so that they can understand the actual historical debate.
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csoursover 1 year ago
In which a more satisfying story &quot;beats&quot; the messiness of true history.
kazinatorover 1 year ago
&gt; <i>many of the stories that have become central to the physics lore are mere pseudo-histories far detached from the real events</i><p>But, like, you know how Newton discovered gravity when an apple fell on his head? Totally true, pinky swear!
tremarleyover 1 year ago
Quantum physics: where the only certainty is that even scientists are uncertain, but don&#x27;t worry, nobody understands it, not even the scientists themselves!
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