On Thu, 4 Aug 2022 23:17:00 -0700 (PDT), Richard Hertz
<hertz778@gmail.com> wrote:

>It reminds me about the life and doings of one failed physicist, that only got
>one Nobel Prize in Physics, just by chance, and that allowed Einstein to publish:
>
>Wilhelm Carl Werner Otto Fritz Franz Wien (Willy, for friends).
>https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Wien/

Nowadays Wien is best remembered as the guy who flunked Heisenberg at
the latter's PHD exam.

Ricardo Jimenez wrote:

> On Thu, 4 Aug 2022 23:17:00 -0700 (PDT), Richard Hertz
> <hertz778@gmail.com> wrote:
>>It reminds me about the life and doings of one failed physicist, that only
>>got one Nobel Prize in Physics, just by chance, and that allowed Einstein
>>to publish:
>>
>>Wilhelm Carl Werner Otto Fritz Franz Wien (Willy, for friends).
>>https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Wien/
>
> Nowadays Wien is best remembered as the guy who flunked Heisenberg at
> the latter's PHD exam.

Nonsense. Please do not talk about things that you know nothing about.
(You only embarrass yourself.)

1. Wien did not "flunk" Heisenberg. He was not even Heisenberg’s thesis
advisor; it was Arnold Sommerfeld, and Heisenberg defended his doctoral
thesis (there was and is no such thing as a Ph.D. degree in Germany)
successfully.

2.

For example, Wien’s (Displacement) Law is much better known to every
(astro)physics student and interested layperson (like citizen scientists).

Given a(n interpolated) black-body spectrum (from an actual spectrum), you
can determine with it the approximate absolute temperature that the black
body (as an approximation of the actual body) has:

T ≈ 0.00289 m K/λ_max,

where λ_max is the wavelength at which the spectrum has its maximum
intensity. For example, the solar spectrum peaks at around 500 nm,
confirming the photospheric solar temperature of

T ≈ 0.00289 m K/(500 nm) ≈ 5780 K

as obtained from solar radiation flux measurements in the upper terrestrial
atmosphere and on Luna, applied to the Stefan–Boltzmann Law.

[The actual effective solar temperature is 5772 K.]

It is also used by thermal scanners e.g. at airports to measure a person’s
body temperature (and thereby determine whether they might be sick) from a
safe distance. (We even had a question in the Physics Ⅱ exam about that
situation.)

See also: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Wien#Career>

PointedEars
--
“Science is empirical: knowing the answer means nothing;
testing your knowledge means everything.”
—Dr. Lawrence M. Krauss, theoretical physicist,
in “A Universe from Nothing” (2009)