Hot Bodies!
Around the turn of the century, physicists were concerned with something called Black Bodies. You see them ever day when you use an electric oven and turn on the rings. A black body is really pretty much what it sounds like - a metal that is naturally black. As you heat this metal, it slowly begins to change color, radiating off some of the energy put into it via heat. It starts with infra-red, slowly moving towards white.
It was thought back then that as you heated it, its energy would increase exponentially forever. This wasn't the fact of the matter though, and nobody new why. Then this new guy on the scene, Plank, said "I solved it!"
"How?!" asked everyone.
"With this CONSTANT! Put it in the equation and the graph matches the experiments!"
"Wow, this is awesome! How'd you find it?"
"... I guessed."
"You what?"
"I guessed! But I got it right, didn't I?!"
Plank was ridiculed horribly over the next few years for failure to provide a proof... so much that he committed scuicide. Within 10 years however, someone did prove it. That is how we, today, now have Plank's Constant.
It was thought back then that as you heated it, its energy would increase exponentially forever. This wasn't the fact of the matter though, and nobody new why. Then this new guy on the scene, Plank, said "I solved it!"
"How?!" asked everyone.
"With this CONSTANT! Put it in the equation and the graph matches the experiments!"
"Wow, this is awesome! How'd you find it?"
"... I guessed."
"You what?"
"I guessed! But I got it right, didn't I?!"
Plank was ridiculed horribly over the next few years for failure to provide a proof... so much that he committed scuicide. Within 10 years however, someone did prove it. That is how we, today, now have Plank's Constant.