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by sgdpk 865 days ago
To be fair, I was taught exactly what this paper claims in my Physics degree. Although I was also taught what they call the "myth" in other classes.
2 comments

Agreed; my professors did use Planck's trick to introduce quantization, but made it very clear that he was just fitting the data and thought the discretization would disappear with further analysis.
I was never taught the myth in an actual class. Every time I have seen it has been in the context of a pop science article or book.
Seemingly also the Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultraviolet_catastrophe) claims the pop-sci ordering: “As the theory diverged from empirical observations when these frequencies reached the ultraviolet region of the electromagnetic spectrum, there was a problem.[3] This problem was later found to be due to a property of quanta as proposed by Max Planck: There could be no fraction of a discrete energy package already carrying minimal energy.”