Ultraviolet Catastrophe - Historical Inaccuracies

Historical Inaccuracies

Many popular histories of physics, as well as a number of physics textbooks, present an incorrect version of the history of the ultraviolet catastrophe. In this version, the "catastrophe" was first noticed by Planck, who developed his formula in response. In fact Planck never concerned himself with this aspect of the problem, because he did not believe that the equipartition theorem was fundamental – his motivation for introducing "quanta" was entirely different. That Planck's proposal happened to provide a solution for it was realized much later, as stated above. Though this has been known by historians for many decades, the historically incorrect version persists, in part because Planck's actual motivations for the proposal of the quantum are complicated and difficult to summarize to a lay audience.