German born Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck began the quantum revolution. His work with light, radiation and quantum physics has provided scientists with a new view of the world and how it functions.
In 1900, Planck published a Nobel winning paper that would literally "turn the world upside down." He suggested that electromagnetic magnetic radiation, such as light, x-rays, gamma rays and more, could not be emitted from an object at arbitrary rates. That is, the radiation emitted from any object can be infinitely small. In place of this, he proposed that all electromagnetic radiation traveled in small packages called quanta. Each individual package was called a quantum, hence the name quantum physics.
It was also speculated before Planck's time that the frequency of waves of radiation could be infinite. This to Planck seemed impossible. His solution with the quanta of light stated that each quantum had a particular amount of energy. This meant that the frequency of the waves an object could emit would be finite because nothing has infinite energy. In other words, the more quanta something emitted, the more energy it would take until a maximum number was reached.