"And lose the name of action..."

[Bandwraith at aol.com]

John Gribbon, _In Search of Schrodinger’s Cat_,
(pp 42-3):

[   But Planck’s discovery announced December 1900, raised more questions 
than it answered, and it failed to set the world of physics on fire... and 
for a long time many- even most- physicists who knew about his work still 
regarded it as a mathematical trick, a device to get rid of the ultraviolet 
catastrophe that had little or no physical significance.... he looked back on 
his work of 1900 and said, “I can characterize the whole procedure as an act 
of despair... a theoretical interpretation had to be found at any price, 
however high it might be.” Yet he knew he had stumbled upon something 
significnt...

 ...There was also something odd about Planck’s new constant, “h.” It is a 
very small constant, 6.6 x 10^ -34 joule-seconds, but that is not so puzzling 
since if it were much bigger then it would have made its presence obvious 
long before physicists began to puzzle over blackbody radiation. No, the 
strange thing about “h” is the units in which it is measured, energy (ergs) 
multiplied by time (seconds). Such units are called “actions,” and they were 
not an everyday feature of classical mechanics- there is no “law of 
conservation of action” to rank with the “law of conservation of mass or 
energy.” But an action has one particularly  interesting property, which it 
shares, among other things, with entropy. A constant action is absolutely 
constant and has the same size for all observers in space and time. It is a 
four dimensional constant, and the significance of that only became apparent 
when Einstein unveiled his theory of relativity....]

"For who would bear the whips and scorns of time...?"


    ” ‘Now then!’ cries Dixon merrily. ”