A Beautiful Planet calls Earth's atmosphere "a delicate cocoon of air that shields us from our star's radiation." Of course, the atmosphere doesn't completely block electromagnetic radiation from the Sun; without some sunlight reaching the surface, plants could not harvest the Sun's energy, and practically no life as we know it could exist. The atmosphere's ozone layer does filter out much of the harmful ultraviolet light (or "UV rays") produced by the Sun. UV rays can cause skin cancer, and catastrophic damage to the ozone layer may have contributed to Earth's most extensive mass extinction of species ever, the End-Permian extinction (also known
Kirchhoff's law of thermal radiation law. This law turned out to be inconsistent yielding the ultraviolet catastrophe. The correct form of the law was found by Max Planck in 1900, assuming quantized emission of radiation, and is termed Planck's law. This marks the advent of quantum mechanics. In a blackbody enclosure that contains electromagnetic radiation with a certain amount of energy at thermodynamic equilibrium, this "photon gas" will have a Planck distribution of energies. One may suppose a second system, a cavity with walls that are opaque, rigid, and not perfectly reflective to any wavelength, to be brought into connection, through an optical filter, with