to imagine fearlessly

Before every new era, every time period of great growth and innovation, there is a crucial sequence of events that take place. Before the large paradigm shift takes place, there is a time period that lays the foundation for which said foundation eventually shapes and dictates the era, forever – the calm before the storm if you will.  Within the calm before the storm and the events leading up to it usually lie the possibilities and opportunities to imagine fearlessly and to alter that discipline forever. Though this idea applies to pretty much every paradigm shift or revolution in one form or another, it was especially evident in the building of the early 20th century as an era for Modern Physics.

“If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.”

In 1905, Albert Einstein published a paper named “On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light”, better known to the world as his seminal work on explanation of the photoelectric effect for which he later went on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921. Though Einstein’s work on his Theories of Relativity and Brownian motion had been popular, his work on the photoelectric effect had validated quantum mechanics a place.

However, if you start looking back, it was Planck’s work on black-body radiation (amongst many other works), that had helped move Physics forward. Around the mid-1890s, Max Planck started to focus on the problem on the problem of black-body radiation. After meddling with the problem, he proposed in 1899 what later became known to be Planck’s law, which described experimentally observed black-body radiation well at the time. The key piece of the work was the Planck postulate, the assumption being that energy was actually quantized, not continuous as energy had been thought of as infinitely divisible in physical systems.

Without Planck’s deep understanding of Boltzmann and Kirchhoff’s work beforehand, and consequently Planck’s work beforehand, Einstein would never have been able to come up with his explanation of the photoelectric effect, or at least not 5 years later. Yet Max Planck had more or less so arrived at a revolutionary idea through the imperative power of logical thinking extrapolated linearly through the facts that were determined to be true within Classical Physics, and had not comprehended the full consequences and use for it. On the other hand, Einstein was able to explain that the energy of photoelectrons was dependent only on the frequency of the light and not its intensity. This theoretical leap as a standard, (something that was in fact directly contradicted James Maxwell’s laws of electromagnetic behavior) was possible only because Einstein was able validate much of Planck’s leap of faith, to have the courage to imagine a new world where the absurd, was actually the standard.

Both men were required to imagine fearlessly: the reluctant revolutionary who built the foundation, and the revolutionary disruptor who shattered the Physics world by making that foundation a standard, as this standard became the basis for the explosion in the advancement of modern physics that followed.