Derivation of Planckʼs radiation law – part 3 | thecuriousastronomer 30/07/2017, 18*21

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Derivation of Planck’s radiation law – part 3

03/09/2015 by RhEvans |

As I have outlined in parts 1 and 2 of this series (see here

(https://thecuriousastronomer.wordpress.com/2015/08/06/derivation-of-plancks-radiation-law-
part-1/) and here (https://thecuriousastronomer.wordpress.com/2015/08/18/derivation-of-
plancks-radiation-law-part-2/)), in the 1890s, mainly through the work of the Physikalisch-
Technische Reichsanstalt (PTR) in Germany, the exact shape of the blackbody spectrum began to
be well determined. By mid-1900, with the last remaining observations in the infrared being
completed, its shape from the UV through the visible and into the infrared was well determined
for blackbodies with a wide range of temperatures.

I also described in part 2 (https://thecuriousastronomer.wordpress.com/2015/08/18/derivation-

of-plancks-radiation-law-part-2/) that in 1896 Wilhelm Wien came up with a law, based on a
thermodynamical argument, which almost explained the blackbody spectrum. The form of his
equation (which we now know as Wien’s distribution law) is

Notice I said almost. Below I show two plots which I have done showing the Wien distribution law
curve and the actual blackbody curve for a blackbody at a temperature of . As you
can see, they are not an exact match, the Wien distribution law fails on the long-wavelength side of
the peak of the blackbody curve.

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(https://thecuriousastronomer.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/numbersscreensnapz001.jpg)
Comparison of the Wien distribution law and the actual blackbody curve for a blackbody at a
temperature of . Although they agree very well on the short wavelength side of
the peak, the Wien law drops away too quickly on the long-wavelength side compared to the
observed blackbody spectrum.

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(https://thecuriousastronomer.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/numbersscreensnapz002.jpg)
A zoomed-in view to highlight the difference between the Wien distribution law and the actual
blackbody curve for a blackbody at a temperature of . Although they agree very
well on the short wavelength side of the peak, the Wien law drops away too quickly on the long-
wavelength side compared to the observed blackbody spectrum.

Planck’s “act of desperation”

By October 1900 Max Planck had heard of the latest experimental results from the PTR which
showed, beyond any doubt, that Wien’s distribution law did not fit the blackbody spectrum at
longer wavelengths. Planck, along with Wien, was hoping that the results from earlier in the year
were in error, but when new measurements by a different team at the PTR showed that Wien’s
distribution law failed to match the observed curve in the infrared, Planck decided he would try
and find a curve that would fit the data, irrespective of what physical explanation may lie behind
the mathematics of the curve. In essence, he was prepared to try anything to get a fit.

Planck would later say of this work

Briefly summarised, what I did can be described as simply an act of desperation

What was this “act of desperation”, and why did Planck resort to it? Planck was 42 when he
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unwittingly started what would become the quantum revolution, and his act of desperation to fit
the blackbody curve came after all other options seemed to be exhausted. Before I show the
equation that he found to be a perfect fit to the data, let me say a little bit about Planck’s
background.

Who was Max Planck?

Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck was born in Kiel in 1858. At the time, Kiel was part of Danish
Holstein. He was born into a religious family, both his paternal great-grandfather and grandfather
had been distiguished theologians, and his father became professor of constitutional law at
Munich University. So he came from a long line of men who venerated the laws of God and Man,
and Planck himself very much followed in this tradition.

He attended the most renowned secondary school in Munich, the Maximilian Gymnasium, always
finishing near the top of his class (but not quite top). He excelled through hard work and self
discipline, although he may not have had quite the inherent natural ability of the few who finished
above him. At 16 it was not the famous taverns of Munich which attracted him, but rather the
opera houses and concert halls; he was always a serious person, even in his youth.

In 1874, aged 16, he enrolled at Munich University and decided to study physics. He spent three
years studying at Munich, where he was told by one of his professors ‘it is hardly worth entering
physics anymore’; at the time it was felt by many that there was nothing major left to discover in
the subject.

In 1877 Planck moved from Munich to the top university in the German-speaking world – Berlin.
The university enticed Germany’s best-known physicist, Herman von Helmholtz, from his
position at Heidelberg to lead the creation of what would become the best physics department in
the world. As part of creating this new utopia, Helmholtz demanded the building of a
magnificient physics institute, and when Planck arrived in 1877 it was still being built. Gustav
Kirchhoff, the first person to systematically study the nature of blackbody radiation in the 1850s,
was also enticed from Heidelberg and made professor of theoretical physics.

Planck found both Helmholtz and Kirchhoff to be uninspring lecturers, and was on the verge of
losing interest in physics when he came across the work of Rudolf Clausius, a professor of physics
at Bonn University. Clausius’ main research was in thermodynamics, and it is he who first
formulated the concept of entropy, the idea that things naturally go from order to disorder and
which, possibly more than any other idea in physics, gives an arrow to the direction of time.

Planck spent only one year in Berlin, before he returned to Munich to work on his doctoral thesis,
choosing to explore the concept of irreversibility, which was at the heart of Claussius’ idea of
entropy. Planck found very little interest in his chosen topic from his professors in Berlin, and not
even Claussius answered his letters. Planck would later say ‘The effect of my dissertation on the
physicists of those days was nil.’

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Undeterred, as he began his academic career, thermodynamics and, in particular, the second law
(the law of entropy) became the focus of his research. In 1880 Planck became Privatdozent, an
unpaid lecturer, at Munich University. He spent five years as a Privatdozent, and it looked like he
was never going to get a paid academic position. But in 1885 Gottingen University announced that
the subject of its prestigoius essay competition was ‘The Nature of Energy’, right up Planck’s alley.
As he was working on his essay for this competition, he was offered an Extraordinary (assistant)
professorship at the University of Kiel.

Gottingen took two years to come to a decision about their 1885 essay competition, even though
they had only received three entries. They decided that no-one should receive first prize, but
Planck was awarded second prize. It later transpired that he was denied first prize because he had
supported Helmholtz in a scientific dispute with a member of the Gottingen faculty. This brought
him to the attention of Helmholtz, and in November 1888 Planck was asked by Helmholtz to
succeed Kirchhoff as professor of theoretical physics in Berlin (he was chosen after Ludwig
Boltzmann turned the position down).

And so Planck returned to Berlin in the spring of 1889, eleven years after he had spent a year there,
but this time not as a graduate student but as an Extraordinary Professor. In 1892 Planck was
promoted to Ordinary (full) Professor. In 1894 both Helmholtz and August Kundt, the head of the
department, died within months of each other; leaving Planck at just 36 as the most senior
physicist in Germany’s foremost physics department.

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(https://thecuriousastronomer.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/img_0879.png)

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Max Planck who, in 1900 at the age of 42, found a mathematical equation which fitted the entire
blackbody spectrum correctly.

As part of his new position as the most senior physicist in the Berlin department, he took over the
duties of being adviser for the foremost physics journal of the day – Annalen der Physik (the journal
in which Einstein would publish in 1905). It was in this role of adviser that he became aware of the
work being done at PTR on determining the true spectrum of a blackbody.

Planck regarded the search for a theoretical explanation of the blackbody spectrum as nothing less
than the search for the absolute, and as he later stated

Since I had always regarded the search for the absolute as the loftiest goal of all scientific
activity, I eagerly set to work

When Wien published his distribution law in 1896, Planck tried to put the law on a solid
theoretical foundation by deriving it from first principles. By 1899 he thought he had succeeded,
basing his argument on the second law of thermodynamics.

Planck finds a curve which fits

But, all of this fell apart when it was shown conclusively on the 2nd of February 1900, by Lummer
and Pringsheim of the PTR, that Wien’s distribribution law was wrong. Wien’s law failed at high
temperatures and long wavelengths (the infrared); a replacement which would fit the
experimental curve needed to be found. So, on Sunday the 7th of October, Planck set about trying
to find a formula which would reproduce the observed blackbody curve.

He was not quite shooting in the dark, he had three pieces of information to help him. Firstly,
Wien’s law worked for the intensity of radiation at short wavelengths. Secondly, it was in the
infrared that Wien’s law broke down, at these longer wavelengths it was found that the intensity
was directly propotional to the temperature. Thirdly, Wien’s displacement law, which gave the
relationship between the wavelength of the peak of the curve and the blackbody’s temperature
worked for all observed blackbodies.

After working all night of the 7th of October 1900, Planck found an equation which fitted the
observed data. He presented this work to the German Physical Society a few weeks later on Friday
the 19th of October, and this was the first time others saw the equation which has now become
known as Planck’s law.

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The equation he found for the energy in the wavelength interval had the form

(compare this to the Wien distribution law above).

After presenting his equation he sat down; he had no explanation for why this equation worked,
no physical understanding of what was going on. That understanding would dawn on him over
the next few weeks, as he worked tirelessly to explain the equation on a physical basis. It took him
six weeks, and in the process he had to abandon some of the ideas in physics which he held most
dear. He found that he had to abandon accepted ideas in both thermodynamics and
electromagnetism, two of the cornerstones of 19th Century physics. Next week, in the fourth and
final part of this blog-series, I will explain what physical theory Planck used to explain his
equation; the theory which would usher in the quantum age.

Posted in History, mathematics, Physics, Science | Tagged Blackbody Radiation, Blackbody

spectrum, Max Planck, Planck radiation law, Rayleigh-Jeans law, Wilhelm Wien | 3 Comments

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Derivation of Planck’s radiation law – part 3 « edit this on 03/09/2015 at 09:02 | Reply
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