Born #onthisday in 1835, Josef Stefan was an ethnic Carinthian Slovene physicist, mathematician, and poet of the Austrian Empire [1].
During his lifetime Stefan published nearly 80 scientific articles, most appearing in the Bulletins of the Vienna Academy of Sciences.
Stefan is perhaps best known for his study of blackbody radiation [2] and for discovering what we now call Stefan's law, a physical power law which states that the total radiation from a blackbody is proportional to the fourth power of its (thermodynamic) temperature. Stefan's law was later extended to grey bodies by one of Stefan's students, Ludwig Boltzmann [3], and is now known as the Stefan–Boltzmann law [4].
@dmm - how did Stefan find his law? Empirically? You could find it using dimensional analysis if you knew the dimensions of the Stefan-Boltzmann constant, but I don't think there's any way to guess the 1/T⁴ factor in that constant without some input from physics.
@dmm - okay, that's interesting! So that set up a challenge to figure out where that T⁴ came from. And ultimately it comes in part from space being 3-dimensional. E.g. if space were 2-dimensional, we'd get T³ in the Stefan-Boltzmann law.
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