biography
| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1835–93)
|
| biography:
| Physicist, born in St Peter, S Austria. He studied at Vienna, where he spent his career. His work in experimental physics was wide-ranging, but his fame rests on his research on thermal radiation, begun in 1879. He found empirically a law describing radiant heat loss from a hot surface (Stefan's law or Stefan–Boltzmann law), and used it to make the first satisfactory estimate of the Sun's surface temperature. Attempts by others to find a theoretical basis for Stefan's law led to major advances in physics, and eventually to Planck's quantum theory of 1900. |
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