Twentieth-century physics began with Planck’s postulate, in 1900, that electromagnetic radiation is not continuously absorbed or emitted, but comes in quanta of energy hn , where n is the frequency and h Planck’s constant. Planck got to this postulate in a complicated way, starting from statistical mechanics. He derived from it his famous law of the spectral distribution of blackbody radiation, n~n !5@ehn /kT21#21, (1) which has been confirmed by many experiments. It is also accurately fulfilled by the cosmic background radiation, which is a relic of the big bang and has a temperature T52.7 K. Einstein, in 1905,