Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 12, 2025
This hypothesis is theoretically conceivable, as has been demonstrated quite recently; but, according to the calculations of Boltzmann, the mathematical improbability of it passes all imagination and practically amounts to absolute impossibility.
Now, however, many physicists, continuing the classic researches of Kirchhoff, Boltzmann, Professors Wien and Planck, and taking their starting-point from the laws of thermodynamics, have given formulas which establish the radiating power of a dark body as a function of the temperature and the wave-length, or, better still, of the total power as a function of the temperature and wave-length corresponding to the maximum value of the power of radiation.
A "law of cooling," proposed by M. Stefan at Vienna in 1879, was shown by Boltzmann, many years later, to have a certain theoretical validity. It is that emission grows as the fourth power of absolute temperature.
Looking at the question, however, from the point of view at which the partisans of the kinetic theories of matter place themselves, the principle is viewed in a new aspect. Gibbs and afterwards Boltzmann and Professor Planck have put forward some very interesting ideas on this subject.
The difficulty would be insoluble if chance had not laws of its own. It was Maxwell who first thought of introducing into the kinetic theory the calculation of probabilities. Willard Gibbs and Boltzmann later on developed this idea, and have founded a statistical method which does not, perhaps, give absolute certainty, but which is certainly most interesting and curious.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking