A history graduate turned physicist proposed that electrons travel as waves
Louis de Broglie took his first degree in history and spent World War I tending radio gear on the Eiffel Tower. Then, in his 1924 doctoral thesis, he suggested that every moving particle, electron included, has a wave attached. Experiments confirmed it three years later, and a Nobel Prize followed.
He was born on 15 August 1892 in Dieppe into the House of Broglie, a noble family of Italian origin long prominent in French army and state service. Charming and blessed with a strong memory, the youngest child expected to study the humanities and earned a history licence in 1910, but switched to science and took a second degree in 1913. His older brother Maurice, an experimental physicist, was a decisive influence.
Wartime duty put him in the Wireless Communications Service, where he worked with the transmitter on the Eiffel Tower and helped set up radio links to submarines. He left the army in August 1919 and later regretted the roughly six years lost to fundamental questions. In Maurice's laboratory he studied X-rays, which his brother thought combined waves and particles, and that conversation primed him.
Building on Einstein's light quanta, he made his leap in the summer of 1923 and presented a short note, Waves and quanta, to the Paris Academy on 10 September. His thesis the following year argued that the wavelength of any moving body equals Planck's constant divided by its momentum. Einstein backed the idea, George Paget Thomson and Clinton Davisson with Lester Germer detected electron diffraction in 1927, and Erwin Schrodinger built wave mechanics on it. De Broglie received the 1929 Nobel Prize in Physics.
He never embraced purely probabilistic quantum theory, offering a pilot-wave picture at the 1927 Solvay meeting that David Bohm revived in 1952. He was the first senior scientist to call for a multinational laboratory, an appeal that led to CERN, and UNESCO gave him its first Kalinga Prize in 1952 for popularising science. In 1944 his brother received him into the Academie Francaise, a first. He inherited the dukedom in 1960, never married, and died on 19 March 1987 aged 94.
Source: Louis de Broglie
