Wilhelm Wien

Wilhelm Wien was a German physicist, Nobel laureate (1911) for his discovery of the displacement law of thermal radiation. Wien showed that the maximum radiation of a black body is inversely proportional to its temperature: the hotter the object, the shorter the wavelength of its peak. This law was a crucial step toward understanding the nature of radiation and paved the way for Planck's quantum theory. Wien's displacement law not only explains the color of heated bodies but also allows astronomers to measure the temperatures of stars and cosmic background radiation. Wien's work on electrodynamics and cathode rays also contributed to the development of particle physics. The scientist went against the prevailing wave paradigm of the time, intuitively sensing the corpuscular properties of light.