The recent sequence of posts on about Max Planck and Planck’s Radiation Law connects to an earlier sequence on my other blog:
- Two-Way Transfer of Heat as OLR/DLR Violates the 2nd Law
- Picture of CMB from Resonance, Not Radiative Heating
- Radiative Heat Transfer: History
- Do Living Physicists Support DLR/Backradiation?
The posts tell a Faustian story about a scientist who sells his rational soul for the fame and glory of being elevated to be the father of modern physics based on statistics of quanta.
Planck’s Fall from the Paradise of Classical Physics crowned by Maxwell’s wave equations, is expressed in the change of presentation of Planck’s Law from the initial one before the Fall in Eight Lectures on Theoretical Physics (1909) partly based on light as deterministic waves, to the final one after the Fall in The Theory of Heat Radiation (1914) based entirely on light as statistics of particles or energy quanta.
The irony is that the Fall initiating modern physics is a step back to the ancient idea of light as streams of particles introduced by Newton and then used by Prevost (1791) to describe radiation.
Modern physics is thus born as a counter-revolution to classical deterministic continuum electro-mechanics throwing physics back to an earlier more primitive form.
Planck’s scientific soul repelled the idea of energy quanta as real physics, but his bodily soul could not resist the attraction from the glory waiting after the Fall. The fight between his two souls is recorded in the book
The result of Planck’s Fall can be seen in the fall of science we are now witnessing as CO2 alarmism (ultimately based on Planck’s proof of Planck’s Law after the Fall) is falling apart.
We pose the following question to the interested reader:
- Why did Planck do what he did?
The World As Computation 
iceskaterfinland
>>•Why did Planck do what he did?
Evidently Einstein had no difficulty applying probability theory to light and had no difficulty about quanta and obviously admired what Planck had produced.
From Einsteins 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect
Click to access Einstein_1905_heuristic.pdf
“THERE exists an essential formal difference between the theoretical
pictures physicists have drawn of gases and other ponderable
bodies and Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetic processes in
so-called empty space.”
“The wave theory of light which operates with continuous
functions in space has been excellently justified for the representation
of purely optical phenomena and it is unlikely ever to be
replaced by another theory. One should, however, bear in mind
that optical observations refer to time averages and not to
instantaneous values.
“In fact, it seems to me that the observations on “black-body
radiation”, photoluminescence, the production of cathode rays by
ultraviolet light and other phenomena involving the emission or
conversion of light can be better understood on the assumption
that the energy of light is distributed discontinuously in space.
According to the assumption considered here, when a light ray
starting from a point is propagated, the energy is not continuously
distributed over an ever increasing volume, but it
consists of a finite number of energy quanta, localised in space,
which move without being divided and which can be absorbed or
emitted only as a whole.”
“I shall show in a separate paper that when considering
thermal phenomena it is completely sufficient to use the so-called
“statistical probability”,
Twenty years later Einstein wrote, “There are therefore now two theories of light, both indispensable, and — as one must admit today despite twenty years of tremendous effort on the part of theoretical physicists — without any logical connection.”