#428 – Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens

9673.317 - 9702.143 Sean Carroll

That's worth the Nobel Prize. Max Planck gets credit for this in 1900, explaining blackbody radiation by saying that when a little electron is jiggling in an object at some temperature, gives off radiation in discrete chunks rather than continuously. He didn't quite say that's because radiation is discrete chunks, right? It's like having a coffee maker that makes one cup of coffee at a time.