Black Body Radiation Law requires the Quantum Hypothesis and the Boson Statistics

Giuseppe Gaeta

John D. Norton

The old quantum theory of black body radiation was manifestly logically inconsistent. It required the energies of electric resonators to be both quantized and continuous. To show that this manifest inconsistency was inessential to the theory's recovery of the Planck distribution law, I extract a subtheory free of this manifest inconsistency but from which Planck's law still follows.

Alexander Bach

R. Hsu, Chin-Rong Lee

We study the black-body radiation and Einstein’s law of transition probability in a q-boson system which obey the q-Heisenberg algebra.

Alexander Bach

O. Passon, Johannes Grebe-Ellis

Abstract Planck’s law for black-body radiation marks the origin of quantum theory and is discussed in all introductory (or advanced) courses on this subject. However, the question whether Planck really implied quantisation is debated among historians of physics. We present a simplified account of this debate which also sheds light on the issue of indistinguishability and Einstein’s light quantum hypothesis. We suggest that the teaching of quantum mechanics could benefit from including this material beyond the question of historical accuracy.