Ferdinand Kurlbaum

"One of the scientists who had discovered the failure of the Planck-Wien law, Ferdinand Kurlbaum, was scheduled to speak first that night. A friend and close colleague of Planck’s, Kurlbaum had no plan to attack Planck’s theory on mathematical or logical grounds. Planck after all was the world’s greatest expert on this topic and universally respected for his deep understanding of thermodynamics (the physics of heat flow and energy). Kurlbaum would simply present the hard data he and his collaborator, Henrich Rubens, had painstakingly collected to test the predictions of the PlanckWien theory. The data would show (to quote Richard Feynman) that “Nature had a different way of doing things.”"