Examination Speech
Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck
By Ziteng Huang
Hello Humans, I am up here once again. This time I am going to introduce you to my favourite guy, who is obviously a scientist. The great remarkable - Mr. Planck! His full name is terribly long so I decided just to call him Mr. Planck. I admire him because he is so smart, he is so creative and he is so successful.
Mr. Planck was born in Holstein in Germany to a well-educated family so eventually he was well educated as well. We could just pass the family part away because it is just not necessary.
During his childhood, his whole family moved to Munich and the small Planck studied in a middle school called - Maximiliansgymnasium. During this period of time, the small Planck was inspired by a mathematician called "Oskar von Miller" and he taught the small Planck the first physical law that he had ever learn in his life- The Conservation of Energy. This is the first time that the small Planck - the master of Physics in the future, got in touch with Physics when he was a child.
Mr. Planck was a genius at music when he was in college. He knew how to play the piano, the pipe organ and the cello. He helped write new songs for orchestra as well. But, even though he was so good at music, even he could live, or I should say, survive with music, he still chose Physics as his University Major. Philip von Jolly, a professor of Physics in Munich, once trying to persuade Planck not to learn physics. He said that "In this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few holes." This is also the opinion that most physicists insisted on, but Planck replied:
"I did not wish to discover new things, but only to understand the known fundamentals of this field and maybe deepen it."
So he started his "Physical" career. He first studied in Experimental physics but soon he found out that was boring so he turned to the Theoretical Physics. After he turned to the Theoretical Physics, a whole new page of physics was opened by Planck.
In that period of time, there are two mountains for physicists to deal with. They are the Michelson-Morley Experiment and the Black-body radiation. These two remarkable experiments have later separated into two remarkable sections of physics - The Relativity and the Quantum Theory.
Mr. Planck is the first digger in the mountain of the Quantum Theory. There is a story which I thought is very funny about Planck, I 'll share it with you right now.
So firstly, let me explain what is the Black-body radiation, shall we? Black-body radiation is produced by an Imaginary object which is - the Black-body. Black-body doesn't reflect or scatter any Electromagnetic Waves, instead, it absorbs all Electromagnetic Waves and radiates thermal radiation.
The Black-body radiates radiation but the radiation is not normal. It contains all frequencies in the spectrum. For example, Gamma Rays could be produced with Radio Waves at the same time. But Radio Waves could be the major radiation that comes from the Black-body and Gamma Ray could only be a small part of it.
All right, let's focus on the main thing now. Physicists have now drawn a graph like this #. The X-axis is the Lamda and the Y-axis is the intensity of the thermal radiation energy.
Now we see that the higher the temperature is, the higher the frequency of the Electromagnetic Wave that the Black body mainly radiates is. But now some of you guys may wonder, how did they get this graph? The answer is that this graph was made by the observations from experiments; which is joint by dots. So these "lazy" physicists said: "Why don't we find the formula for this graph so these experiments won't be needed anymore!"
and they have all gone busy again because they wanted to be lazy.
The first guy who gave the formula is called Wilhelm Wien, a German physicist. He found out that every Maximum point of each curve times the temperature of each curve that gives the same number! Which is a constant! Now we call it Wien's displacement Constant. Anyway, Wien's formula fits very well in short Lamda but would produce the error in long Lamda.
Then the second guy Rayleigh–Jeans gave another formula which looks like this #. However, this formula fits well in long Lamda but would produce the error in short Lamda. The error is not a small deviation because as the Lamda decreases, the intensity of the thermal radiation energy will become infinitely big, just like the mass expansion formula. This was called- the Ultraviolet Catastrophe. Some people may say that this formula was Wrongly wrong! It is so obvious that this formula is totally a trash! But the scary thing is, Rayleigh's inferences are really reasonable! It was inferred by the Energy equipartition theorem step by step! If this doesn't work that means the current physical theory cannot explain it!
Then our main character Mr. Planck showed up. What he did is that he just guessed it and he got it right! What on Earth was this situation! But the question immediately came after: Why this formula? Mr. Planck was embarrassed so he had to have an explanation about the formula and an essay about the inferences. Soon on the 24th of December, 1900, Mr. Planck out spoke to the Berlin Institute of Physics and said that remarkable hypothesis:" In order to establish this formula, we have to assume that the Blackbody radiates energy Discontinuously." That means the energy radiates in a potion then a potion instead of continuously. Each potion has to be equal to e0 = hv. In another way of saying this is that the single frequency produced by Blackbody has to be the Integer multiple of the e0 = hv. This is called Quantum hypothesis and this hypothesis opened up the gate of the Quantum Theory.
The reason I admire Mr. Planck so much is that his super strong mathematical derivation ability and his successful and valuable physical formulae as well as theories. Just because Mr. Planck gave us accessibilities to visit the Quantum World, we are now developing our next generation computers which are Quantum Computers.
He is the person I admire for. Because of him, I got in touch with Quantum Physics and I love it!
Thank you