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

160 CHAPTER 35. RADIATION: PLANCK
• There are now two theories of light, both in-dispensible and - as one admit
despite twenty years of tremendous effort on the part of theoretical physicists
- without any logical connection
35.4 Bohr
• A new epoch was inaugurated in physical sciences by Planck’s discovery of
the quantum of action
35.5 Millikan: NP in Physics 1923
• But the conception of localized light-quanta out of which Einstein got his
equation must still be regarded as far from established. Whether the mechanism
of interaction between ether waves and electrons has its seat in the
unknown conditions and laws existing within the atom, or is to be looked
for primarily in the essentially corpuscular Thomson-Planck-Einstein conception
of radiant energy, is the all-absorbing uncertainty upon the frontiers
of modern Physics (The electron and the light-quanta from the experimental
point of view, Nobel Lecture, May 23, 1923).
• Despite the apparently complete success of the Einstein equation (for the
photoelectric effect), the physical theory on which it was designed to be the
symbolic expression, is found so untenable that Einstein himself, I believe,
no longer holds to it .
35.6 Bohr
• To derive the Planck radiation law, it is essential that the energy of the atom
has discrete vakues and change discontinuosly.
35.7 Lotte Warburg sister to Otto Warburg
NP in Physics
• Planck has become a stone-aged man, stooped, pitiful. I saw shuffling through
the park, untidy and unkempt. He said that no on asked him about things
anymore, that science was no longer worth anything. (1933)