It’s a hypothetical material, where all internal heat is converted to an outgoing radiation at the highest possible energy state, with none in the lower energy states such as, but not limited to, the visible part of the spectrum. Thus, the body is black.
It doesn’t matter. It’s not an important concept, per se. It is simply useful to describe what you might see from an ideal gas, in a gas-excitation chamber like a neon light, which only emitted energy in the highest energy band. Why do physicists want to talk about a gas like this? Because before you can get smaller than the electron, you have to be able to identify something smaller than an electron. A state of an electron is a pretty good candidate. So by defining a theoretical thing, a material which emits an electron at a specific state, you can take an atom like Neon, and say it’s actually made up of X bosons and Y gluons, etc etc.
Here is the best video on YouTube about it: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2vQDbaO0k8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2vQDbaO0k8)
Black body radiation is the gateway drug to sub-atomic physics, a field that has not produced any new fields of technology, only labeled other new fields of technology as due to their phenomena. It replaces atomic physics, which produced the end of WWII and, if you desired, infinite energy. Maybe we can throw CAT scans, x-ray radiation and electron microscopy in there as well, as the electron was in the standard model before it had the two cool cousins no one has ever seen.
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