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Wilhelm Wien

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Wilhelm Wien was a famous German physicist. He studied how heat and light work together.

His work helped us understand how objects give off light. This is very important for science. He looked at how heat turns into radiation. This helped start the study of quantum mechanics. This is the science of very tiny things.

Wien found a special rule for heat. It is called Wien's displacement law. This law links temperature to light. It tells us how much light a hot object gives off. It uses a peak wavelength to show this. The law relates the temperature to the color of light.

He also made a formula for blackbody radiation. This formula works in the photon-gas limit. This means it works when there are many light particles.

Wien was born in 1864 in Prussia. His family lived in places like Drachenstein. He went to school in Heidelberg and Berlin. He studied at the University of Göttingen too. He worked in a lab with Hermann von Helmholtz. In 1886, he earned his Ph.D. degree. He studied how light hits metals. He also studied how materials change light color.

Wien was a very busy teacher. He taught at RWTH Aachen University. He also taught at the University of Würzburg. He was a successor to Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen. In 1920, he taught at the University of Munich. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1911. This was for his work on heat radiation. He gave a famous lecture at Columbia University in 1913.

Wien also made a tool called the Wien filter. This tool is also called a velocity selector. It uses electric and magnetic fields. These fields work together in a special way. They help scientists pick particles by their speed. This tool is used in electron microscopes. It is also used in spectrometers.

He once found a tiny particle in gas. It has the same mass as a hydrogen atom. Later, scientists named this particle a proton.

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