Joseph Stefan

Joseph Stefan was a physicist and mathematician from Austria-Hungary who lived from 1835 to 1893. He is best known for formulating the Stefan-Boltzmann Law, which describes how much energy a blackbody (an idealized object that absorbs all radiation) emits based on its temperature. Specifically, the law states that the energy emitted increases dramatically as the object gets hotter, proportional to the fourth power of its temperature. This principle helps explain phenomena in astrophysics, climate science, and thermodynamics by linking temperature to radiative energy output.