- Planck postulate
The Planck Postulate (or Planck's Postulate) was used by
Max Planck in his derivation of his law of black body radiation in 1900. It is thepostulate that the energy ofoscillator s in ablack body is quantized by::,
where "n" = 1, 2, 3, ..., "h" is
Planck's constant , and ν is the frequency. This assumption allowed Planck to derive a formula for the entirespectrum of ablack body .Planck was unable to justify this assumption based on classical physics. In 1905 in one of his three most important papers, Einstein adapted the Planck postulate to explain the
photoelectric effect , but Einstein proposed that the energy of photons themselves was quantized, and that quantization was not merely a feature of microscopic oscillators.Planck's postulate was further applied to understanding the
Compton effect , and was applied byNiels Bohr to explain the spectrum of thehydrogen atom and derive the correct value of theRydberg constant .Book References
Tipler, Paul A. (1978). "Modern Physics", Worth Publishers, Inc.
External links and sources
* [http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/PlanckPostulate.html Planck Postulate] — from "Eric Weisstein's World of Physics"
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.