“Prehistory of the quantum theory of radiation - from Planck to Dirac” (Dr. Alexander Blum)

In this talk, I will give an overview of the early history of a quantum history of radiation – from its beginnings in 1900, as the central issue of quantum physics in the problem of black body radiation, to its establishment as a subfield of the new quantum mechanics in 1927, with Paul Dirac’s foundational work on quantum field theory.