What was Planck studying in the last part of the nineteenth century?
In the last years of the nineteenth century, Planck was investigating the problem of black-body radiation first posed by Kirchhoff some forty years earlier. It is well known that hot objects glow, and that hotter objects glow brighter than cooler ones. The electromagnetic field obeys laws of motion similarly to a mass on a spring, and can come to thermal equilibrium with hot atoms. The hot object in equilibrium with light absorbs just as much light as it emits. If the object is black, meaning it absorbs all the light that hits it, then its thermal light emission is maximized.
A generation later, the Irish Anglican bishop, George Berkeley (1685–1753), determined that Locke's view immediately opened a door that would lead to eventual atheism. In response to Locke, he put forth in his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) an important challenge to empiricism in which things only exist either as a result of their being perceived, or by virtue of the fact that they are an entity doing the perceiving. (For Berkeley, God fills in for humans by doing the perceiving whenever humans are not around to do it.) In his text Alciphron, Berkeley maintained that any order humans may see in nature is the language or handwriting of God. Berkeley's approach to empiricism would later come to be called subjective idealism.