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In 1913 de Broglie was awarded his Licence ès Sciences but before his career had progressed much further World War I broke out. During the War de Broglie served in the army. He was attached to the wireless telegraphy section for the whole of the war and served in the station at the Eiffel Tower. During these war years all his spare time was spent thinking about technical problems. He explained how he was attracted to mathematical physics after the War (see for example ):
Taking up research in mathematical physics, de Broglie nevertheless maintained an interest in experimental physics. His brother Maurice de Broglie was at that time carrying out experimental work on X-rays and this proved a considerable interest to de Broglie during the first few years of the 1920s during which he worked for his doctorate. De Broglie's doctoral thesis Recherches sur la théorie des quanta (Researches on the quantum theory) of 1924 put forward this theory of electron waves, based on the work of Einstein and Planck . It proposed the theory for which he is best known, namely the particle-wave duality theory that matter has the properties of both particles and waves. In a lecture de Broglie gave on the occasion when he received the Nobel Prize in 1929 he explained the background to the ideas contained in his doctoral thesis (see for example ):
During an interview in 1963 de Broglie described how, given the above background, his discoveries came about:
The wave nature of the electron was experimentally confirmed in 1927 by C J Davisson, C H Kunsman and L H Germer in the United States and by G P Thomson (the son of J J Thomson) in Aberdeen, Scotland. De Broglie's theory of electron matter waves was later used by Schrödinger , Dirac and others to develop wave mechanics. After his doctorate, de Broglie remained at the Sorbonne where he taught for two years, becoming professor of theoretical physics at the Henri Poincaré Institute in 1928. From 1932 he was also professor of theoretical physics at the Faculté des Sciences at the Sorbonne. De Broglie taught there until he retired in 1962. From 1944 he was a member of the Bureau des Longitudes. In 1945 he became an adviser to the French Atomic Energy Commissariat. His greatest honour was being awarded the Nobel Prize in 1929. We have quoted above from his lecture given at the award ceremony. Let us quote further from the lecture (see for example ):
After receiving the Nobel Prize in 1929 De Broglie worked on extensions of wave mechanics. Among publications on many topics he published work on Dirac's theory of the electron, on the new theory of light, on Uhlenbeck 's theory of spin, and on applications of wave mechanics to nuclear physics. He wrote at least twenty-five books including Ondes et mouvements (Waves and motions) (1926), La mécanique ondulatoire (Wave mechanics) (1928), Une tentative d'interprétation causale et non linéaire de la mécanique ondulatoire: la théorie de la double solution (1956), Introduction à la nouvelle théorie des particules de M Jean-Pierre Vigier et de ses collaborateurs (1961), Étude critique des bases de l'interprétation actuelle de la mécanique ondulatoire (1963). The last three mentioned books were published in English translations as Non-linear Wave Mechanics: A Causal Interpretation (1960), Introduction to the Vigier Theory of elementary particles (1963), and The Current Interpretation of Wave Mechanics: A Critical Study (1964). He wrote many popular works which demonstrate his interest in the philosophical implications of modern physics, including Matter and Light: The New Physics (1939); The Revolution in Physics (1953); Physics and Microphysics (1960); and New Perspectives in Physics (1962). In 1933 de Broglie was elected to the Académie des Sciences becoming Permanent Secretary for the mathematical sciences in 1942. The Académie awarded him its Henri Poincaré Medal in 1929 and the Albert I of Monaco Prize in 1932. Other honours which he received included the Kalinga Prize which was awarded to him by UNESCO in 1952 for his efforts towards the understanding of modern physics by the general public. The French National Scientific Research Centre awarded him its gold medal in 1956. Further honours included the awarding of the Grand Cross of the Légion d'Honneur and Belgium made him an Officer of the Order of Leopold. He received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Warsaw, Bucharest, Athens, Lausanne, Quebec, and Brussels. He was elected to honorary membership of eighteen academies and learned societies in Europe, India, and the United States. De Broglie described himself as:
The central question in de Broglie's life was whether the statistical nature of atomic physics reflects an ignorance of the underlying theory or whether statistics is all that can be known. For most of his life he believed the former although as a young researcher he had at first believed that the statistics hide our ignorance. Perhaps surprisingly, he returned to this view late in his life stating that:
Let us end our biography with the tribute paid to de Broglie by C W Oseen, Chairman of the Nobel Committee for Physics of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences :
Source:School of Mathematics and Statistics University of St Andrews, Scotland |