Why is plancks constant h

All the physics they knew at that point said it should look a certain way, but reality looked completely different and no one knew why. The problem would be solved by a man named Max Planck. Previous physicists had assumed that atomic vibrations were continuous; that is, they could vibrate at any frequency.

Planck decided to assume that atoms could only vibrate at certain frequencies that were whole number multiples of some base frequency, which he called h. In other words, atoms could vibrate at the h frequency, or 2 h , or 3 h , but not 2. This was a really bizarre assumption, but it worked. Mobile Newsletter banner close.

Mobile Newsletter chat close. Mobile Newsletter chat dots. Mobile Newsletter chat avatar. Mobile Newsletter chat subscribe. Physics Terms. Planck's constant was devised in by German physicist Dr. Max Planck, who would win the Nobel Prize for his work.

The constant is a crucial part of quantum mechanics, the branch of physics dealing with the tiny particles that make up matter and the forces involved in their interactions.

Library of Congress. Now That's Interesting. Cite This! It only takes a minute to sign up. Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search. The problem he was solving was blackbody radiation, for which the experimental data came from spectroscopy people.

So the data was tabulated in frequency. With angular frequencies, the quantization postulate becomes:. We are happy almost everywhere. Before evaluating these quantities to obtain an idea of their magnitude, we will introduce some notations that will be very useful. The "quantities" in the quote are the energy and radius of the Bohr atom. It is moreover interesting to observe that a vortex ring with healing distance, i.

A really modern view in quantum physics has indeed to consider quantum vacuum as a superfluid Planck didn't know this, for this reason "h" is still "in circulation" using a pun!

Indeed the question "Planck constant is a quantum of action. But what kind of action? Sign up to join this community.