Quantum Pioneers: Max Planck

On April 23, 1858 Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck was born in Kiel, Germany. At the age of nine his interest in physics and mathematics was developed by his teacher Hermann Muller. When he graduated at the age of seventeen he decided to choose physics over music for his career. He in turn did independent studies primarily on Rudolf Clausius' writings of thermodynamics which inspired him and in July 1879 he received his doctoral degree at the age of twenty-one. After he decided to become a theoretical physicist he started a quest for absolute laws. His favorite absolute law was the law of the conservation of energy which was the first law of thermodynamics that stated that you could take any equal amount of energy and transform it into the same equal amount of energy ideally, meaning no energy was lost. The second law of thermodynamics led him to discover the quantum of action or Planck's constant h. How he came upon his formula for quantum mechanics well be explained as follows. Planck saw that blackbody radiation acted in an absolute sense because it was defined by Kirchhoff as a substance that could absorb almost all radiating energy and emit all that it had absorbed perfectly which is associated with the first law of thermodynamics. By using various experiments and theoretical failures many scientists tried to find the spectral energy distribution to try and draw a diagram of a curve that showed the amount of radiation given off at different frequencies for a blackbody with a given temperature. Then using Wien's law which worked out for high frequencies but didn't work for low, he saw a relationship with the mathematics of the entropy of the radiation in the high- frequency waves in correlation to the low frequency waves and he guessed if he combined the two in the simplest way that he would get a formula that related to the amount of radiation to a blackbody's frequency. Although Planck's formula was accepted to be correct without argue, he was not satisfied and he tried to relate his formula with the absolute laws which he loved so much. In order to make sense of his formula he had to kick the second law of thermodynamics out the door and accepted it as a statistical law, as it was interpreted by Ludwig
Boltzmann. He also had to accept that the blackbody could not absorb energy continuously but in separate amounts of energy spread over time like pulses. Planck called this quantum of energy. To prove his formula even further he used it to find Planck's constant h, which turned out to be a very small number(six and fifty-five hundredths times ten to the negative twenty-seventh power). The fact that Planck's constant was not zero and it was in fact a number made the unseen physical world indescribable by classical methods which sparked a revolution in physical theory. When Planck discovered the theory of quantum he was forty-two and then later won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1918. After his discovery he still contributed to physics increasingly. Planck was the first physicist to back up Einstein's theory of relativity. Planck’s contributions to the modern world are vast. He led Albert Einstein towards the theory of relativity which led to the construction of the atom bomb. That is one huge example of the things Max Plank made possible by discovering quantum theory.

Nuclear fission takes place when an atom's nucleus splits into two or more smaller nuclei. These smaller nuclei are called fission products. Particles (e.g., neutrons, photons, alpha particles) usually are released, too. This is an exothermic process releasing kinetic energy of the fission products and energy in the form of gamma radiation. Fission may be considered a form of element transmutation since changing the number of protons of an element essentially changes the element from one into another. Nuclear fusion is a process in which atomic nuclei are fused together to form heavier nuclei. Extremely high temperatures (on the order of 1.5 x 107°C) can force nuclei together. Large amounts of energy are released when fusion occurs.

References
Max Planck. (2013). Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th Edition, 1.
Roger H., S. (2012). Planck, Max. Britannica Biographies, 1.