Why is plancks constant important

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The constant — devised in by a German physicist named Max Planck , who would win the Nobel Prize for his work — is a crucial part of quantum mechanics , the branch of physics which deals with the tiny particles that make up matter and the forces involved in their interactions. From computer chips and solar panels to lasers, "it's the physics that explains how everything works. Planck and other physicists in the late s and early s were trying to understand the difference between classical mechanics — that is, the motion of bodies in the observable world around us, described by Sir Isaac Newton in the late s — and an invisible world of the ultrasmall, where energy behaves in some ways like a wave and in some ways like a particle, also known as a photon.

As an explanation, he cites the example of a familiar harmonic oscillator , a child on a swing set. Hence, the child can swing at any continuous range of energies from zero up to a certain point. But when you get down to the level of quantum mechanics, things behave differently. Only a certain amount of energy is allowed. Planck's constant defines the amount of energy that a photon can carry, according to the frequency of the wave in which it travels.

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Advertisement - Continue Reading Below. More From Science. Discovery and understanding go hand-in-hand; together they move science forward, and as science moves forward, the quality of our lives improves. Chemistry tells us that the smallest amount of water is a water molecule, and any container of water consists of a staggering number of identical water molecules.

In order to resolve an underlying problem in the theory of energy distribution, Planck wondered, What if energy worked the same way? What if there were a smallest unit of energy, just as there is a smallest unit of water?

So what is this smallest unit of energy? Today, we know that. The concepts of location, velocity, and even existence itself blur at the atomic and subatomic level.