While reading about Max Planck discovery of the quantum nature of light and the limitation of classical physics, I stumbled upon this site and this sentence which confused me greatly.
http://physics.weber.edu/carroll/honors/failures.htm
>Classical physics said that each frequency of vibration should have the same energy.
This isn't the case, right? Didn't Rayleigh-Janes, using classical EM, predicted that energy increases as frequency increases?
>>7977596
Did you even read the sentences after it?
>>7977602
Yes, the next sentence pretty much refers to Rayleigh-Jeans law but I failed to see how that relates to the previous sentence at all? Am I misunderstanding something here?
The sentence I'm confused at seems to imply that low frequency = high frequency in terms of energy.
>Classical physics said that each frequency of vibration should have the same energy.
>>7977596
>Classical physics said that each frequency of vibration should have the same energy
>>7977596
>Classical physics said that each frequency of vibration should have the same energy.
>Classical physics said that each frequency of vibration should have the same energy
>>7977596
It's taking about the distribution of energy m8. Sure, classical physics said that with two waves with the same amplitude, the one with the higher frequency has the higher energy. They thought that in a cavity, the energy would be distributed equally throughout the frequency spectrum - that there would be no preferred way to dump the energy. This would be bad - a blackbody radiator would kill us with gamma rays.
>>7977795
So, basically, according to classical physics, the energy of each wave, regardless of frequency, will be equal in a cavity. There will be more waves in higher frequency hence higher energy. Did I get that right?
>>7977931
Yup, that's it - equipartition of energy. You should read about wein's law - he comes up with an explanation of why this doesn't happen in cavities through a thermodynamic argument considering slow adiabatic expansion of the cavity.
