When I recall the days of twenty years ago, when the conception of the physical quantum of "action" was first beginning to disentangle itself from the surrounding mass of available experimental facts, and when I look back on the long an tortuous road which finally led to its disclosure, this development strikes me at times as a new illustration of Goethe's saying that "man errs, so long as he is striving." And all the mental effort of an assiduous investigator must indeed appear vain and hopeless if he does not occasionally run across striking facts which form incontrovertible proof of the truth he seeks, and show him that after all he has moved at least one step nearer to his objective. The pursuit of a goal, the brightness of which is undimmed by initial failure, is an indispensable condition, though by no means a guarantee, of final success.
In my own case such a goal has been for many years the solution of the question of the distribution of energy in the normal spectrum of radiant heat. ...
Since this whole problem deals with a universal law of nature, and since I was then, as today, pervaded with a view that the more general and natural a law is the simpler it is (although the question as to which formulation is to be regarded as the simpler cannot always be definitely and unambiguously decided), I believed for the time that the basis of the law of the distribution of energy could be expressed by the theorem that the value of R is proportional to the energy. But in view of the results of new measurements this conception soon proved untenable. ...
Two simple limits were established by direct observation for the function R: for small energies proportionality to the energy, for large energies proportionality to the square of the energy. Nothing therefore seemed simpler than to put in the general case R equal to the sum of a term proportional to the first power and another proportional to the square of the energy, so that the first term is relevant for small energies and the second for large energies; and thus was found a new radiation formula which up to the present has withstood experimental examination fairly satisfactorily. Nevertheless it cannot be regarded as having been experimentally confirmed with final accuracy, and a renewed test would be most desirable.
But even if this radiation formula should prove to be absolutely accurate it would after all be only an interpolation formula found by happy guesswork, and would thus leave one rather unsatisfied. I was, therefore, from the day of its origination, occupied with the task of giving it a real physical meaning, and this question led me, along Boltzmann's line of thought, to the consideration of the relation between entropy and probability; until after some weeks of the most intense work of my life clearness began to dawn upon me, and an unexpected view revealed itself in the distance. ...
To work out these probability considerations the knowledge of two universal constants is required, each of which has an independent meaning, so that the evaluation of these constants from the radiation law could serve as an a posteriori test whether the whole process is merely a mathematical artifice or has a true physical meaning. The first constant is of a somewhat formal nature; it is connected with the definition of temperature. ...
Much less simple than that of the first was the interpretation of the second universal constant of the radiation law, which, as the product of energy and time (amounting on a first calculation to 6.55x10-27 erg. sec.) I called the elementary quantum of action. While this constant was absolutely indispensable to the attainment of a correct expression for entropy--for only with its aid could be determined the magnitude of the "elementary region" or "range" of probability, necessary for the statistical treatment of the problem--it obstinately withstood all attempts at fitting it, in any suitable form, into the frame of the classical theory. So long as it could be regarded as infinitely small, that is to say, for large values of energy or long periods of time, all went well; but in the general case a difficulty arose at some point or other which became the more pronounced the weaker and the more rapid the oscillations. The failure of all attempts to bridge this gap soon placed one before the dilemma: either the quantum of action was only a fictitious magnitude, and, therefore, the entire deduction from the radiation law was illusory and a mere juggling with formulae, or there is at the bottom of this method of deriving the radiation law some true physical concept. If the latter were the case, the quantum would have to play a fundamental role in physics, heralding the advent of a new state of things, destined, perhaps, to transform completely our physical concepts which since the introduction of the infinitesimal calculus by Leibnitz and Newton have been founded upon the assumption of the continuity of all causal chain of events.
Experience has decided for the second alternative.
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