Wien’s Displacement Law and Blackbody Radiation Quartiles

Abstract

The conventional approach to teaching blackbody radiation in introductory modern physics courses relies on an oversimplified explanation of Wien’s displacement law, which does not uphold students’ conceptual understanding of Planck’s law and can lead to well-known misconceptions. Thus, there is a need to clarify the pedagogical role of this concept, while trying to make it more useful for making unambiguous estimates of spectral distributions of blackbodies. This necessarily requires the use of displacement laws, which are independent from the spectral scale of choice.