biography
| name: |
Wien, Wilhelm (Carl Werner Otto Fritz Franz)
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pronunciation:
[veen]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1864–1928)
|
| biography:
| Physicist, born in Gaffken, Germany. He studied at Göttingen and Berlin, worked as assistant to Helmholtz, and later was professor at Würzburg (1900–20) and then at Munich. In the early 1890s he studied thermal radiation, and by 1896 had developed Wien's formula describing the distribution of energy in a radiation spectrum as a function of wavelength and temperature. The formula's accuracy reduces as wavelength increases, and it was this failure which inspired Planck to devise the quantum theory, which revolutionized physics in 1900. Wien was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1911. |
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