I retired as a systems engineer in 2017; as a kid, I was already amazed while browsing an extensive Larousse encyclopedia from the beginning of the twentieth century at my grandparents’ house, this has not changed since, with the Google search engine and Wikipedia now. A lifetime spent solving increasingly complex problems, from electronics to computing, sharpens certain parts of your brain.
In the fall of 2021, I became a self-taught physicist while browsing the evolution of physics up to the present day, I came across an article dealing with the evolution from Galileo to Einstein, where at the end we read that if the photon had a mass, then perhaps we should reconsider Newton. At the end, he cited an experiment on the validation of Coulomb’s law, which gave a mass of 1.6 10-50 and to conclude that it was so small that it could be considered as zero. At the time, I remained perplexed. Everything was relative, small compared to what? So I compared the mass of an electron with the sun: of the order of 10-60. A little later, I remained perplexed by Planck’s relation “E=hν” for a former electronics engineer; with radio frequencies, radar, or ultrasound, we are used to using power and not energy because, with frequencies, we deal with progressive waves, therefore, energy flows. Also, let’s consider a frequency as the number of cycles per second with this formula, whatever the frequency. We find the energy of a cycle always equal to the energy component of the constant h. So there, I connected with Newton’s corpuscle and the mass of the photon; out of curiosity, I called on Newton’s mechanics with h=1/2 mc2 => m=1,47 10-50!
So, I embarked on a Sherlock Holmes-style investigation to understand where this singularity came from.E=hν“? When I would have rather expected to have “P=hν” with h only in Joules and not Joules-seconds. After extensive research and numerous exchanges with the Wikipedia reference desk, I ended up focusing on Max Planck’s first writing, which revealed this formula. I read and reread it dozens of times, discussing this or that point that I didn’t understand with Wikipedia.
I didn’t find what I was looking for, so I changed paradigms and took up Max Planck’s demonstration while remaining in the spectral energy luminance of a surface. By applying the Kirchhoff-Clausius law in two dimensions, I saw a remarkable physical element replacing the Planck resonator. So, I wrote an article covering this demonstration and will submit it this October 2024.
Continued to the next episode.