He published a series of papers on thermodynamically irreversible processes, gaining him recognition in the rapidly growing field. He was the first to consider the distinguishability of energy quanta in the statistical analysis of elementary processes, a precursor of the concept of quantum indistinguishability. He discovered a quantum statistics, rediscovered 11 years later by Satyendra Nath Bose and generalized by Albert Einstein though his derivation was not in terms of einstein's light quanta aka photons – the Bose–Einstein statistics.