Max Planck's and the UV catastrophe???? (1 Viewer)

[Prawnchip]

Hey guys

How exactly does Planck's hypothesis explain the experimental results/predicted curve on radiation vs intensity graph?
I get that he proposed that the energy from the black body is a multiple of a minimum value (E = hf) but how does this explain the bell shape curve????

 

[anomalousdecay]

This was a long time ago so bear with me on this one (I could be incorrect).

The catastrophe started as it was thought that an ideal black body would emit an infinite amount of energy. So they thought by classical physics that a black body would emit UV to compensate for high energies.

So they thought you could get skin cancer by wearing too much black (not srs lol).

However what was discovered is that energy is found in discrete packets, so it was impossible for infinite amount of energy to result in a single packet.

How does this work? Well instead of emitting photons with very large energies, black bodies emit many photons (in high numbers) with a similar amount of energy. So the intensity changes. This occurs as the energy is done in discrete packets of quanta not randomly fluctuating single photons with more energy than the sun (as an exaggeration).



So what we are graphing is the hyperbolic function above right?

No we are not graphing this.

Remember we are graphing the function of Intensity vs wavelength.

So we get this bell curve shape which explains everything due to some more complex maths.

Intensity is measured as the power transferred per unit area.


Again if I am wrong please correct me its been at least half a year since I touched this stuff.