Quantum Mechanics. How Quantum Suicide Works". A man sits down before a gun, which is pointed at his head. This is no ordinary gun; it's rigged to a machine that measures the spin of a quantum particle. Each time the trigger is pulled, the spin of the quantum particle -- or quark -- is measured. Depending on the measurement, the gun will either fire, or it won't. If the quantum particle is measured as spinning in a clockwise motion, the gun will fire. If the quark is spinning counterclockwise, the gun won't go off. There'll only be a click. Nervously, the man takes a breath and pulls the trigger. Go back in time to the beginning of the experiment.
But, wait. This thought experiment is called quantum suicide. Personal and Historical Perspectives of Hans Bethe. Lectures. Chapter 3. Classical physics could not explain the spectra of black bodies. It predicted that the intensity (power emitted at a given wavelength) of emitted light should increase rapidly with decreasing wavelength without limit (the "ultraviolet catastrophe"). In the figure below, the curve labeled "Rayleigh-Jeans law" shows the classically expected behavior. However, the measured spectra actually showed an intensity maximum at a particular wavelength, while the intensity decreased at wavelengths both above and below the maximum.
In order to explain the spectra, in 1900 the German physicist Max Planck (1858 - 1947) was forced to make a desperate assumption for which he had no physical explanation. E = hf (Planck's formula) where h (Planck's constant) is an exceedingly small number whose value we do not need here, and f is the frequency of vibration of the oscillator (the number of times it vibrates per second). 3.2. L=h/p where p is the momentum (mass x velocity) of the electron. 3.3. 3.4.