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Anti-Semitism
The hatred of Jews. Anti-Semitism was common in Germany even before the 1930s, but it increased as economic conditions grew worse and as the German people grew more discontented and looked for someone to blame. Adolf Hitler capitalized on this rising wave of anti-Semitism, riding it to power. Once Hitler was in power, anti-Semitism became a government policy, and Jews across the country were driven by their jobs and persecuted by their neighbors. -
Appeal of the Ninety-Three Intellectuals
A manifesto signed by ninety-three German intellectuals in support of German military action in World War I. Many of these academics were so eager to announce their support of the fatherland that they signed without reading it. It was a move they came to regret. After the war, the German intellectual community was shunned by many of their European colleagues, in part due to their signatures on this type of document. -
Blackbody Radiation
A blackbody is a black box that absorbs all the radiation directed at it. The amount of energy it emits is independent of the size or shape of the box and depends only on temperature. The concept was introduced by Robert Kirchhoff in 1859. For decades afterward, physicists struggled with trying to figure out the spectrum of the energy emitted by the blackbody. But the problem remained unsolved until 1900, when Planck finally came up with a working formula. -
Copenhagen Interpretation
The interpretation of quantum physics that came to be accepted in the late 1920s. Planck disliked the theory, believing that it was a way of giving up on the important questions. If the Copenhagen Interpretation was correct, Planck reasoned, it would mean that scientists could never learn any objective facts about the universe. -
E = hv
In this equation that made Planck famous, E stands for energy, v stands for frequency, and h is a constant, now known as Planck's constant. The equation defines the relationship between energy and frequency in a blackbody. The radical implication of this equation was that light came in finite packets, multiples of hv. -
International Research Council
A scientific organization founded in 1919, which was designed to shut German scientists out of the international scientific community. Planck and his colleagues battled to get German scientists admitted to the organization's meetings, projects, and publications. They eventually succeeded. -
Positivism
A philosophy of science asserting that scientific truths can only come from and refer to scientists' direct experience with the world. According to the positivists, there is no objective reality, no deeper truth. Fact can only come from direct, subjective observation. -
Quantum Physics
The new system of physics created at the beginning of the twentieth century to explain the bizarre, counterintuitive behavior of light and subatomic particles. Physicists realized that activity on this small scale could not be described using physical models from the larger world, and they were forced to cobble together a new understanding of the way the basic particles of matter interact. The creation of quantum physics constituted an exciting revolution in the way people studied and applied physics. -
Solvay Conference
A series of conferences about the problems of quantum physics that attracted top physicists from all over Europe. Planck was invited to the 1927 conference, even though his most productive years were behind him. The invitation was symbolic of his position as the father of quantum physics and of a new spirit of tolerance and acceptance toward the German scientists. -
University of Göttingen
The German center of the quantum physics revolution.