Planck’s constant is the smallest possible unit of energy. Energy, like space and time, is a key concept of physics that was initially thought to be continuous. It was defined in the nineteenth century as the ability to move matter around, which was called work, so burning coal in a steam engine produced work by converting coal energy to the kinetic energy of the moving train. That energy allows work that transfers energy explained how engines operate, but there was a problem.
The problem was that light didn’t follow the rules. The furnaces of the day gave off light at many frequencies, so as they got hotter, all the frequencies should increase equally, including the dangerous ones. But hot furnaces don’t give off lethal doses of x-rays that kill their workers, so physicists called this blessing the ultraviolet catastrophe because that their laws didn’t apply was a disaster for them.
The relevant law was that a physical wave’s energy increased as its frequency squared, so doubling its frequency should quadruple its energy. Heating a furnace to increase all its light frequencies should then make it lethal. Why it didn’t wasn’t explained until Planck proposed that atoms emit light energy in multiples of a basic amount, later called Planck’s constant, by the equation:
Light Energy = Plank’s constant x Frequency
That light energy varied linearly with frequency matched the observed result but no-one knew why. In theory, waves are continuous, so adding energy to high frequency light should just increase it, but heating a furnace didn’t affect all frequencies equally. Einstein then showed that light comes in packets called photons based on the photo-electric effect. Heating a furnace then didn’t produce as many high frequency photons because they required more energy, so the ultraviolet catastrophe was avoided.
It follows that energy isn’t continuous but comes in basic units of Planck’s constant and light comes in indivisible units called photons, but why remained a mystery. This model attributes both to the quantum network having a core process, so nothing can be simpler than a photon and Planck’s constant represents the basic network operation. Light then comes in indivisible packets because each photon is an indivisible Planck process, and Planck’s constant is the smallest energy transfer because it represents the basic transfer operation.
Energy in network terms is then the processing available per cycle at a point. If every photon is the same process distributed, short wavelength photons transfer more processing at each point and so have more energy, while long wavelength photons transfer less processing at each point, so have less energy. The energy of a photon then depends linearly on its wavelength, and hence its frequency, as Planck described. By this logic, the equation Planck assumed can be derived from processing principles (Note 1).
To summarize, one photon is one Planck process divided over its network wave length, so it must increase or decrease discretely. Adding a point distributes the process more, to make the energy transfer rate less, while reducing a point makes the energy transfer rate increase. The photon’s energy then increases linearly with frequency because distributing the same process more is a linear effect.
Note 1. Let one photon be a Planck process divided over the points of its wavelength, and the constant h represent that process as a quantum network transfer. Let energy E be the processing transfer rate at a point and W be the number of points in the photon wavelength. Every photon is then one Planck process divided between W points, so the processing transfer rate at a point E = h/W. If f is the number of network cycles each point takes to run a Planck process that it can complete in one cycle, then f = 1/W. The equation E = h.f then follows, where E, h, and f are defined in quantum units. Converting these units to per second terms then gives E = h.f, which is Planck’s equation. Plank’s constant then represents the transfer of one Planck process.