An unorthodox view on quantum mechanics

Quantum mechanics was definitely one of the most significant and important discoveries of 20 century science. It all began, I think, in the year 1900 when Max Planck published his paper entitled “On the Theory of the Energy Distribution Law of the Normal Spectrum” [1]. In it, he describes a simple observation: if one attaches an entropy to the radiation field as if its total energy came in packages – now called quanta – then the intensity of the radiation associated to a certain temperature agrees quite well with the observations. Planck had described his hypothesis as ‘an act of desperation’. But it was the only one that worked. Head on. Until that time, the best attempt at performing such a calculation had resulted in the Rayleigh-Jeans law, an important result at the time, but this law only worked at the lowest frequencies of the radiation, whereas it failed bitterly at high frequencies / smaller wavelengths. The Rayleigh-Jeans law would yield a badly divergent, hence meaningless, expression for the intensity of the radiation emitted at high frequencies.