Customer Reviews

The Theory Of Heat Radiation (1914)

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In 1900 Max Planck introduced a quantum constant into his mathematical expression for the energy distribution of blackbody radiation. This act is now considered to mark the beginning of the twentieth century revolution in physics. Planck's contemporaries had difficulty understanding his earliest papers on the quantum concept. In 1906 and 1914 Planck published more comprehensive accounts of his theory of blackbody heat radiation and his quantum hypothesis.

This American Institute of Physics publication, The Theory of Heat Radiation, reprints these two later works - Vorlesungen Uber die Theorie der Warmestrahlung (1906) and his revised and expanded second edition (1914). The 1906 work is in German while the revised 1914 edition is in English. This publication is volume 11 in the outstanding AIP series titled The History of Modern Physics 1800-1950.

I found the lengthy introduction by Allan Needell to be very helpful in placing Planck's work in the proper historical context and in identifying points at which Planck made key changes in his personal views. Much of Needell's introduction is devoted to Planck's gradual acceptance of Boltzmann's probabilistic approach to entropy.

The first fifty pages examine heat radiation from the perspective of classical optics, including topics like radiation at thermodynamic equilibrium, Kirchhoff's law, and blackbody radiation. The next fifty pages, deductions from electrodynamics and thermodynamics, were substantially more mathematical. Planck discussed the Stefan-Boltzmann law of radiation and the Wien displacement law in detail as well as spectral distribution of energy radiation. Section III presents a general procedure for calculating entropy and introduces his quantum hypothesis. I did not study section IV (Planck's derivation of the law of the distribution of energy in the spectrum of blackbody radiation), nor section V (Irreversible Radiation Processes.)

Despite an extended effort on my part, I did not find Planck's systematic examination of heat radiation to be particularly helpful as an aid to mastering thermodynamics. Its appeal is largely historical. Needell rightly observes that Planck's works will primarily benefit those readers who seek to study and understand the history of quantum physics. However, I do believe that general readers with substantial familiarity with thermodynamics and electrodynamics will find it worthwhile to study Allan Needell's thoughtful introduction and to browse Max Planck's seminal work.

For those looking for a more basic self-tutorial, I highly recommend Thermodynamics by Enrico Fermi. Dover Publications has reprinted this remarkably lucid, concise work in an inexpensive soft cover format. This short book is based on a series of lectures given by Fermi at Columbia University in 1936.

I also recommend chapter one, Thermal Radiation and Planck's Postulate, in the widely used text book Quantum Physics of Atoms, Molecules, Solids, Nuclei, and Particles by Robert Eisberg and Robert Resnick.

I recommend this book to anyone involved with radiative heat transfer, even engineers. Usually one makes contact with this subject through engineering-oriented books. But, at least in this case, the original work is much better. Engineers usually don't like to read physics books, but this one is pretty accessible and easy to understand.

If you look through the first chapter, right away you will notice that the digital copy was unable to perform a good copy. Words like ultraviolet become <<:00vi0le1 Buy the book. It will sit well for you on the shelf and doesn't take up much space.

While this is the old book I have wanted to check out for years, it came as a bit of a disappointment when I finaly got it. The robot-based scan-and-flip system used for its re-creation did a pretty poor job in OCR. This is especially bad for all the equations used in this book. The end result is that I had to download the PDF images of this book from the publisher and painstakingly go through each page looking for typos (which are a lot...) To make things worse, the original copy used for the digital creation was full of hand-written notes and highlights, causing even more errors in the OCR results.

Unless you are very, very interested in the subject, you should probably spend the time to read five other books.