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This paper is nice but appears to stretch its result quite a bit. First, the authors make a general claim about "most physics textbooks" without providing a si

This paper is nice but appears to stretch its result quite a bit. First, the authors make a general claim about "most physics textbooks" without providing a single example. I think one will often encounter more nuanced statements in the better and more widely used textbooks. And I think the paper sorely lacks evidence for the general claim in the concluding sentence: "The idea that physics progress through a series of crisis, is hard to defend." Not only do they present only a single example, but even in that case one could claim that the "crisis" started after the discovery of Planck's formula! After all, it fitted the data supremely well but required this mystery constant: h. It took physicist a quarter century to resolve the deeper meaning of Planck's constant. If that was not a crisis in physics then I do not know what would qualify as one.

alacritas0 3y ago
i wouldn’t consider a quarter century of work by the field a crisis
littlestymaar 3y ago
> to defend." Not only do they present only a single example Really? When there Mercury's perihelion mystery at the exact same period? (Which got us general relativity)
alecst 3y ago
It's not a stretch at all in my opinion, not only was I taught this myself (multiple times at two separate universities in the US) but there was a paper addressing this myth as far back as the 60s. Though I do agree with your second point. I can name two crises off the top of my head: the black hole information paradox, and the galaxy rotation curves which some claim are due to dark matter. One is a major theoretical problem, and the other is a major experimental problem. And though crises they may be, it's not like people are running around with their hair on fire.
- d0mine 3y ago
  There is a crisis in cosmology right now e.g., the apparent conflict in our measurements of the expansion rate of the early versus the modern universe. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLd19WvC9yqUf5TRqYoMYxEwjT6JIDW4Zn https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLd19WvC9yqUf5TRqYoMYxEwjT...
  - nullc 3y ago
    It's not really a conflict in rates that is the issue, so much as a conflict about the jerk of cosmic inflation? :P
btilly 3y ago
I have no idea about current textbooks. But certainly the physics textbook that I learned from quoted the myth. And it is easy to find examples online, like https://chem.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Physical_and_Theoretical_Chemistry_Textbook_Maps/Map%3A_Physical_Chemistry_for_the_Biosciences_(Chang)/11%3A_Quantum_Mechanics_and_Atomic_Structure/11.02%3A_Planck's_Quantum_Theory https://chem.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Physical_and_Theoret..., that still do. I wish it were otherwise, but there are some weird dynamics in the textbook industry that reward looking like other textbooks more than accuracy and usefulness. A classic essay showing this is "The Case of the Creeping Fox Terrier Clone" in Gould's book Bully for Brontosaurus" that traces the history of textbooks comparing Hyracotherium* to a fox terrier. This, despite the fact that most students and authors have absolutely no real idea how big a fox terrier is. And it wouldn't help if they did know, given that Hyracotherium actually weighed over twice as much! Another classic essay showing how textbooks repeat other textbooks without properly questioning what should be taught is https://web.williams.edu/Mathematics/lg5/Rota.pdf https://web.williams.edu/Mathematics/lg5/Rota.pdf. If you've taken some variant of the differential equations course that he discusses, I highly recommend reading his essay. I guarantee that it is far from the only standard course with such levels of silliness.
- ilya_m 3y ago
  > Another classic essay showing how textbooks repeat other textbooks without properly questioning what should be taught is https://web.williams.edu/Mathematics/lg5/Rota.pdf https://web.williams.edu/Mathematics/lg5/Rota.pdf. If you've taken some variant of the differential equations course that he discusses, I highly recommend reading his essay. I guarantee that it is far from the only standard course with such levels of silliness. Thank you for sharing Rota's delightful lecture! I wish more professors/instructors took a critical look at their material, which is nearly always is taught in the order that was put in place for some now utterly irrelevant or forgotten reasons. If the science progresses at the speed of the hearse, the education of scientific subjects barely moves at all.
- tomjakubowski 3y ago
  see also Econ 101 textbooks repeating the myth of widespread barter economy "before" money
f1shy 3y ago
I do not think calling out specific books would be remotely good idea in many different levels. There are ao many examples, it makes no sense to enumerate any. Virtually every explanation I know starts with that myth.
- bmacho 3y ago
  Why do you think that? I think naming 3 of them would be better than naming 0 of them.
  - _dain_ 3y ago
    I don't have a textbook at hand but I remember being taught this history by physics lecturers in my undergrad. I find it strange that many people in this thread are gainsaying the existence of this narrative. It's surely a commonplace part of physics education?
vondur 3y ago
My Physical Chemistry textbook also refers to it as the UltraViolet Catastrophe.
pflats 3y ago
I was curious, so I grabbed three undergraduate-level physics texts I had nearby. One explicitly recites the Ultraviolet Catastrophe prompted Planck story, complete with Rayleigh's incomplete formula. One essentially matches the story in section 2, using the lesser version of Rayleigh's formula, but (just like the story) does not explicitly tie Planck's work to it. (That textbook notes "an act of desperation" is a quote from one of Planck's letters.) The third one is interesting! It says that "late nineteenth century physicists tried to understand the shape of the blackbody spectrum [...] using their knowledge of thermodynamics and electromagnetic waves. Their efforts ended in failure." This third text never mentions Rayleigh by name and doesn't specifically show "Rayleigh's Lesser Formula", but it does graph that formula vs. the observed blackbody radiation (interestingly, as a function of frequency instead of wavelength). The text then eventually says that in 1900, Planck used a photon argument "to make a theoretical prediction that is in excellent agreement with the experimental spectrum". It does not explicitly state cause and effect, but it's kinda implied from the structure of the writing. Reading into the third text a smidge, it feels like the result of wanting to use the Rayleigh/Catastrophe story and yet knowing it wasn't quite true.
- stracer 3y ago
  The third source is still wrong, as Planck certainly would not agree that he used the photon argument to make a prediction. He tried to explain the experimental data on blackbody radiation, which manifested the spectral peak, and an agreement with the Rayleigh-Jeans and Wien laws in the two frequency limits. Thus not a prediction, but an explanation of the observed thing. And he did not believe in photons, he interpreted his work in terms of classical EM radiation obeying some entropy condition, and quanta of energy that he used were considered either a math trick to make calculations with that entropy, or a condition on the emission process only in his later theories. He never assumed or believed that EM radiation consists of quanta.
- smcin 3y ago
  Useful to give the title, author, and date of those three texts.
cyberax 3y ago
Realistically, the UV catastrophe was not a crisis. Simply because pretty much nobody understood its implications. It was like: "Quantization of light makes this formula work? OK, whatever". At that time, the main catastrophe was caused by the null results in the search for the luminiferous aether (Michelson-Morley experiments). At the same time, questions about the structure of matter and the composition of the atom were another crisis point. Earnshaw's theorem states that matter can't be held together by electromagnetic forces alone.

alacritas0 3y ago

i wouldn’t consider a quarter century of work by the field a crisis

littlestymaar 3y ago

> to defend." Not only do they present only a single example Really? When there Mercury's perihelion mystery at the exact same period? (Which got us general relativity)

alecst 3y ago

It's not a stretch at all in my opinion, not only was I taught this myself (multiple times at two separate universities in the US) but there was a paper addressing this myth as far back as the 60s. Though I do agree with your second point. I can name two crises off the top of my head: the black hole information paradox, and the galaxy rotation curves which some claim are due to dark matter. One is a major theoretical problem, and the other is a major experimental problem. And though crises they may be, it's not like people are running around with their hair on fire.

d0mine 3y ago
There is a crisis in cosmology right now e.g., the apparent conflict in our measurements of the expansion rate of the early versus the modern universe. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLd19WvC9yqUf5TRqYoMYxEwjT6JIDW4Zn https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLd19WvC9yqUf5TRqYoMYxEwjT...
- nullc 3y ago
  It's not really a conflict in rates that is the issue, so much as a conflict about the jerk of cosmic inflation? :P

btilly 3y ago

I have no idea about current textbooks. But certainly the physics textbook that I learned from quoted the myth. And it is easy to find examples online, like https://chem.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Physical_and_Theoretical_Chemistry_Textbook_Maps/Map%3A_Physical_Chemistry_for_the_Biosciences_(Chang)/11%3A_Quantum_Mechanics_and_Atomic_Structure/11.02%3A_Planck's_Quantum_Theory https://chem.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Physical_and_Theoret..., that still do. I wish it were otherwise, but there are some weird dynamics in the textbook industry that reward looking like other textbooks more than accuracy and usefulness. A classic essay showing this is "The Case of the Creeping Fox Terrier Clone" in Gould's book Bully for Brontosaurus" that traces the history of textbooks comparing Hyracotherium* to a fox terrier. This, despite the fact that most students and authors have absolutely no real idea how big a fox terrier is. And it wouldn't help if they did know, given that Hyracotherium actually weighed over twice as much! Another classic essay showing how textbooks repeat other textbooks without properly questioning what should be taught is https://web.williams.edu/Mathematics/lg5/Rota.pdf https://web.williams.edu/Mathematics/lg5/Rota.pdf. If you've taken some variant of the differential equations course that he discusses, I highly recommend reading his essay. I guarantee that it is far from the only standard course with such levels of silliness.

ilya_m 3y ago
> Another classic essay showing how textbooks repeat other textbooks without properly questioning what should be taught is https://web.williams.edu/Mathematics/lg5/Rota.pdf https://web.williams.edu/Mathematics/lg5/Rota.pdf. If you've taken some variant of the differential equations course that he discusses, I highly recommend reading his essay. I guarantee that it is far from the only standard course with such levels of silliness. Thank you for sharing Rota's delightful lecture! I wish more professors/instructors took a critical look at their material, which is nearly always is taught in the order that was put in place for some now utterly irrelevant or forgotten reasons. If the science progresses at the speed of the hearse, the education of scientific subjects barely moves at all.
tomjakubowski 3y ago
see also Econ 101 textbooks repeating the myth of widespread barter economy "before" money

f1shy 3y ago

I do not think calling out specific books would be remotely good idea in many different levels. There are ao many examples, it makes no sense to enumerate any. Virtually every explanation I know starts with that myth.

bmacho 3y ago
Why do you think that? I think naming 3 of them would be better than naming 0 of them.
- _dain_ 3y ago
  I don't have a textbook at hand but I remember being taught this history by physics lecturers in my undergrad. I find it strange that many people in this thread are gainsaying the existence of this narrative. It's surely a commonplace part of physics education?

vondur 3y ago

My Physical Chemistry textbook also refers to it as the UltraViolet Catastrophe.

pflats 3y ago

I was curious, so I grabbed three undergraduate-level physics texts I had nearby. One explicitly recites the Ultraviolet Catastrophe prompted Planck story, complete with Rayleigh's incomplete formula. One essentially matches the story in section 2, using the lesser version of Rayleigh's formula, but (just like the story) does not explicitly tie Planck's work to it. (That textbook notes "an act of desperation" is a quote from one of Planck's letters.) The third one is interesting! It says that "late nineteenth century physicists tried to understand the shape of the blackbody spectrum [...] using their knowledge of thermodynamics and electromagnetic waves. Their efforts ended in failure." This third text never mentions Rayleigh by name and doesn't specifically show "Rayleigh's Lesser Formula", but it does graph that formula vs. the observed blackbody radiation (interestingly, as a function of frequency instead of wavelength). The text then eventually says that in 1900, Planck used a photon argument "to make a theoretical prediction that is in excellent agreement with the experimental spectrum". It does not explicitly state cause and effect, but it's kinda implied from the structure of the writing. Reading into the third text a smidge, it feels like the result of wanting to use the Rayleigh/Catastrophe story and yet knowing it wasn't quite true.

stracer 3y ago
The third source is still wrong, as Planck certainly would not agree that he used the photon argument to make a prediction. He tried to explain the experimental data on blackbody radiation, which manifested the spectral peak, and an agreement with the Rayleigh-Jeans and Wien laws in the two frequency limits. Thus not a prediction, but an explanation of the observed thing. And he did not believe in photons, he interpreted his work in terms of classical EM radiation obeying some entropy condition, and quanta of energy that he used were considered either a math trick to make calculations with that entropy, or a condition on the emission process only in his later theories. He never assumed or believed that EM radiation consists of quanta.
smcin 3y ago
Useful to give the title, author, and date of those three texts.

cyberax 3y ago

Realistically, the UV catastrophe was not a crisis. Simply because pretty much nobody understood its implications. It was like: "Quantization of light makes this formula work? OK, whatever". At that time, the main catastrophe was caused by the null results in the search for the luminiferous aether (Michelson-Morley experiments). At the same time, questions about the structure of matter and the composition of the atom were another crisis point. Earnshaw's theorem states that matter can't be held together by electromagnetic forces alone.