Black-body Radiation Law deduced from Stochastic Electrodynamics

SOME years ago, one of us developed, in collaboration with M. Spighel and C. Tzara, a stochastic version of Wheeler and Feynman's ‘absorber’ theory of radiation, with a classical ‘zero-point’ fluctuating field corresponding to residual interactions of all charged particles1. The energy spectrum was derived and found to be proportional to a universal constant—identifiable with Planck's constant h. In the framework of this stochastic electrodynamics it was possible to deduce results of a typically quantum flavour, such as the existence of a stationary ground-level for the harmonic oscillator2. A weaker but similar result was announced later by T. Marshall3,4.