The ultraviolet catastrophe
Planck fitted the measured blackbody spectrum by assuming energy is exchanged in discrete amounts, an assumption he regarded as a mathematical trick. Einstein took it literally in 1905 to explain the photoelectric effect. A mismatch between theory and a curve on a graph started quantum mechanics.
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Posed 1900, the Rayleigh–Jeans law. Closed 1900, Max Planck's quantum hypothesis.
Sources
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