Dr Faustus of Modern Physics - Department of Speech, Music and ...

104 CHAPTER 23. THE ULTRAVIOLET CATASTROPHE
• Listen to a presentation hopefully triggering curiosity.
• Watch a short movie about Planck and his quanta.
Looking at the radiance (energy emitted as radiation) as a function of the
wave-length in Fig. ??, you see two things to explain:
• why is there a cut-off to zero radiance at very small wavelengths?
• why is the peak of the radiance curve shifted to smaller wave-lengths
as the temperature increases (Wien’s displacement law)?
It appeared that classical wave mechanics could not give any answers to
these questions, which added to the emerging credibility crisis of continuum
physics. Wilhelm Wien received the 1911 Nobel prize in Physics with the
motivation:
• ...for your discoveries concerning the laws of thermal radiation. You
have devoted your researches to one of the most difficult and spectacular
problems of physics, and among the researchers now living it is you who
has succeeded in making the greatest and most significant contributions
to the solution of the problem.
But Wien did not solve the riddle, simply passed it on to Planck...