I read with great interest Matt Stanley’s article on why physicists should study the history of their subject and how that history is important to physics education. I fully concur with his statement that one of the most valuable lessons from the history of science is to learn how the concepts of physics were discovered.
Unfortunately, authors of physics textbooks often make up convenient stories about the development of physics, which then are repeated endlessly. For example, one of the most important concepts in physics was Max Planck’s introduction of energy discreteness in atomic physics, which led to the development of quantum mechanics. The tale in most textbooks is that he was concerned about the UV catastrophe encountered by the application of the equipartition theorem to the electromagnetic theory of light. But there is no evidence that Planck was aware of the problem, first pointed out by Lord Rayleigh. The actual origin of Planck’s fundamental new physical concept is quite different and much more interesting. He found the idea of energy discreteness in Ludwig Boltzmann’s 1877 seminal paper on statistical mechanics, where it was introduced as a purely mathematical device to count configurations in a model of a molecular gas. But Planck’s application to the problem of blackbody radiation was subtle, and to date historians continue to disagree on its interpretation.1–4
