Table of Contents

Preface xi
A Brief Guide to the Trail xv
1 The Prehistory of Blackbody Radiation 1
2 Classical Thermodynamics 7
3 Kirchhoff's Law, 1859 25
4 The Stefan-Boltzmann Law, 1884 33
5 Wien's Contributions, 1893-1896 51
6 The Damped, Driven, Simple Harmonic Oscillator 69
7 The Fundamental Relation 79
8 Planck's Zeroth Derivation, 1900 91
9 Boltzmann's Statistical Mechanics 105
10 Planck's "First Derivation," 1900-1901 119
11 Einstein's Response, 1905-1907 129
12 Einstein on Emission and Absorption, 1917 139
The Big Ideas 147
Acknowledgments 155
Annotated Bibliography 157
Appendix A English Translation of "A Derivation of Stefan's Law, Concerning the Temperature Dependence of Thermal Radiation, from the Electromagnetic Theory of Light" by Ludwig Boltzmann in Graz (1884) 161
Appendix B English Translation of "A New Relationship between Blackbody Radiation and the Second Law of Thermodynamics" by Willy Wien in Charlottenburg (1893) 165
Appendix C An Electromagnetic Adiabatic Invariant 177
Appendix D An Ideal Gas "Displacement Law" 181
Notes 187
Index 201

About the Author

Don S. Lemons is Professor of Physics Emeritus at Bethel College in North Newton, Kansas and the author of Drawing Physics- 2,600 Years of Discovery from Thales to Higgs and Thermodynamic Weirdness- From Fahrenheit to Clausius (both published by the MIT Press).

William R. Shanahan, now retired, was a scientific staff member at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Louis Buchholtz is Professor of Physics Emeritus at California State University, Chico.

Reviews

"Black-body radiation — emitted and absorbed by non-reflective bodies in thermal equilibrium — was named by Gustav Kirchhoff in 1862. But he and others were perplexed by calculations suggesting it should be infinite at high frequencies. This unavoidably mathematical history by three physicists follows the trail from Kirchhoff to Max Planck — who in 1900 explained that the radiation could change its energy only in minimal increments proportional to the wave’s frequency — and Albert Einstein’s quantum theory of radiation in 1917."
—Nature