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Physics Bulletin

Waves and particles

Louis de Broglie

Published Mar 1, 1971• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

When in the spring of 1926 Erwin Schrödinger set out the form of the equation for wave propagation and drew important conclusions from it, in some very elegant work which appeared to develop the ideas which I had introduced in 1923–24 (de Broglie 1924), he really profoundly modified the ideas which had guided me two years earlier in my original research. For his idea was that although the ψ wave which he was introducing was still a true physical wave propagated in space and time, it would not have any single area of high field concentration which could be a particle; whereas in my original concept I assumed that the coexistence of waves and particles, perceived by Einstein in 1905 in respect of light in his theory of light quanta, should be extended to all types of particle in the form of the coexistence of a physical wave with a particle incorporated in it.

DOI
10.1088/0031-9112/22/3/016

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Abstract We have seen that it took about two decades to fully realize that light or, generally, electromagnetic radiation has both wave and particle properties. The final proof came with the discovery of the Compton effect (Episode 31). Even Compton himself needed years before he saw that the particle picture of radiation was unavoidable in view of the experimental evidence. Still in the year of Compton’s publications, Louis de Broglie [1] on purely theoretical grounds proposed that the particle–wave duality not only holds for radiation but also for material particles, i.e., for particles with a rest mass such as the electron.
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