Black Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity 1894–1912

Thomas S Kuhn 1979 Clarendon Press: Oxford University Press xvi + 356 pp price £12.50 Lecturers in physics, not historians of science who will in any case hail this work as a major contribution to their discipline, will not be surprised to learn that the discontinuity of spectral energy emerged through detailed study of the enigma of black body radiation. That topic had held the fascination of theorists and experimentalists since 1859, when Kirchhoff first stated the need to find a distribution function for spectral energy.