The Bumpy Road: Max Planck from Radiation Theory to the Quantum (1896-1906)

Massimiliano Badino 

1 Introduction

The birth of the quantum theory is one of the most impressive example of scientific revolution.What makes this historical episode intriguing is that the breakthrough originated from a ‘clas-sical’ research program that progressively accumulated conceptual and experimental tensionsup to the point of generating a ‘non-classical’ outcome. This circumstance is particularly fa-vorable to the historians because it allows to confine the emergence of a recognized revolutionto a very limited temporal and local context. This however does not mean that the reconstruc-tion is necessarily simple. The tight interplay of highly technical topics belonging to fields asdiverse as electromagnetism, thermodynamics and combinatorics has constituted a hinder formany historians to the extent that a full account of this interplay is still a desideratum.

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