If you overlay all atomic spectra, you get a Planck distribution
I&#x27;ve seen this blow up in several places now, but there seriously is nothing to this paper.<p>Essentially all they&#x27;re pointing out is that the set of atomic transition energies (1) is positive, (2) has a smooth distribution, (3) goes to zero at zero and infinity, (4) has a maximum somewhere in between, (5) is skewed right. All of these things are completely mundane and well-understood, and not at all unique to the &quot;Planck distribution&quot;. Statisticians probably know of tens of other distributions with these properties, which would fit their curve about as well.<p>Their claim is like saying that <i>any</i> function that goes from -1 to 1 smoothly must be a logistic function, or <i>any</i> function that goes to 0 at infinity but slowly must be a power law. That&#x27;s not a paper, that&#x27;s a hunch. If the researchers wanted to be serious, they could have run a statistical test to quantify how well the data fit the Planck distribution (just like tests of normality are routinely done in statistics). But they didn&#x27;t, and the reason probably is because the test would fail.