6 OPTICS FOR ENGINEERS
black body, which we will discuss in Section 12.5, was a topic of much debate. The prevail-
ing theories led to the prediction that the amount of light from a hot object increased with
decreasing wavelength in such a way that the total amount of energy would be innite. This
so-called ultraviolet catastrophe and its obvious contradiction of experimental results con-
tributed in part to the studies that resulted in the new eld of quantum mechanics. Among
the many people who developed the theory of quantum mechanics, Einstein stands out for his
“miraculous year” (1905) in which he produced ve papers that changed physics [29]. Among
his many contributions were the notion of quantization of light [30], which helped resolve
the ...