Why 'h' for Planck's constant?

[Derleth]

@Chipacabra

You still use π?

I prefer τ.

[mathmore]

He chose h because it stands for “hilfe” in german, wich means “help me”. He included this constant within a theory that he did’nt belive, he was despairing.

[Itself]

@John_Mace

Real physicists use ħ, not h (“h-bar” = h/2π).

Real real physicists just set ħ = 1.

[IAmBroom]

@mathmore

He chose h because it stands for “hilfe” in german, wich means “help me”. He included this constant within a theory that he did’nt belive, he was despairing.

That sounds like a “Just-So” story. Since we have citations from near the period supporting the “Hilfsgrösse”/“Auxiliary Variable” idea, it seems less likely.

Can you support your claim with citations?

[Exapno_Mapcase]

We need a science version of Poe’s Law. I first thought mathmore’s post was a joke, but I suppose it could be real.

[Chronos]

My guess is that someone told it to mathmore as a joke, but that he misinterpreted it as true, and rushed off to the Internet to share his newfound knowledge.

[Melbourne]

@Chronos

My guess is that someone told it to mathmore as a joke, but that he misinterpreted it as true, and rushed off to the Internet to share his newfound knowledge.

My guess is that mathmore told it as a joke, but that the SDMB misinterpreted it as as a ‘truth’, and rushed off to the Internet to share the accusation.

[Chronos]

My guess is more consistent with the fact that he searched up a zombie thread to post it in. I mean, really, when was the last time you heard (or made up) a physics joke, and then searched online for some place to tell it?

[tim314]

@DHMO

it would be reasonable to conjecture that “h” represents the “harmonic oscillator”.

I doubt this is it, only because Planck’s paper that introduced h doesn’t use the term “harmonic oscillators”. He instead used the term “linear monochromatic resonators”. He also said it in German, but either way none of those words start with an h.

[Chopsticks]

@MikeS

This paper claims that Planck used h for the German word Hilfsgrösse. My German is nicht sie gut, but as far as I can tell this means “auxiliary quantity”.

If I saw ‘auxiliary quantity’ as a definition, the English phrase I’d use would be “fudge factor”. Which pairs well with Planck initially treating “quanta” as a math tool (vs a real object)

[tim314]

@Pasta

Here’s my guess, backed up with absolutely no citations.

Planck needed a symbol for a constant of proportionality, but k was taken by Boltzmann’s constant (German: “konstant”). h is nearby, distinct, and unused (contrast i and l). I doubt it came from any particular word. Indeed, there was no good physical interpretation of h when it was first written down.

I’ve read somewhere that k wasn’t even used until Planck introduced it in the same paper where he introduced h. That is, Boltzmann had discussed the proportionality but not assigned the constant a letter nor attempted to compute its value. From Planck’s Nobel lecture:

@Max Planck

This constant is often referred to as Boltzmann’s constant, although, to my knowledge, Boltzmann himself never introduced it - a peculiar state of affairs, which can be explained by the fact that Boltzmann, as appears from his occasional utterances, never gave thought to the possibility of carrying out an exact measurement of the constant. Nothing can better illustrate the positive and hectic pace of progress which the art of experimenters has made over the past twenty years, than the fact that since that time, not only one, but a great number of methods have been discovered for measuring the mass of a molecule with practically the same accuracy as that attained for a planet.