As if the failure of the Michelson-Morley experiment to find any evidence of the “luminiferous ether” wasn’t vexing enough, another mystery plagued physicists near the end of the nineteenth century.
Metal heated sufficiently will begin to emit electromagnetic radiation, in the form of light—first red, orange, yellow, then blue.
The so-called blackbody problem was the inability of classical physics to explain the exact relationship between heat applied to the metal, the frequency of the radiation emitted (color of light), and the energy contained in the radiation.
German Physicist Max Planck solved the problem, Albert Einstein provided additional insights, and a new field of physics, quantum mechanics, was born in the early twentieth century.
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Max Planck, britannica.com
David Weintraub 