Louis de Broglie

This is exactly how quantum mechanics was invented.

If you go back to, like, Planck, and Einstein, and Bohr, and de Broglie, they were all, like, making up these ad hoc rules when they invented quantum mechanics, and it wasn't until Heisenberg and Schrödinger in the 19- mid-1920s, 25 years later, that we were able to have a fully blown theory of quantum mechanics.

And even then, of course, you all know it's really not fully blown theory because the measurement problem is, is still sticking around.

So we don't exactly know what the right way to think about string theory at the deepest possible level is.

The quantum theory that existed at this time was useful, certainly, but it lacked the kind of fundamental elegance that had characterized the great theories of the past.

Into this situation stepped a young French aristocrat named Louis de Broglie, a man whose path to physics had been anything but conventional.

Born into a family of diplomats and military officers, de Broglie had initially studied history before turning to physics after being inspired by conversations with his older brother Maurice, an experimental physicist.

During the First World War, Louis had served at the wireless telegraphy station on the Eiffel Tower, and this experience with radio waves seemed to plant seeds in his thinking that would later blossom into revolutionary ideas.

Leading to experimental discoveries and theoretical frameworks that would transform quantum mechanics entirely.

But in 1924, de Broglie's matter waves remained a beautiful possibility, a tantalizing suggestion that nature's symmetries might run deeper than anyone had dared to imagine, waiting quietly for the confirmation that would elevate them from speculation to established facts.

The theoretical elegance of Louis de Broglie's matter waves was one thing, but science demanded evidence that could be touched, measured, and repeated.

Throughout 1925 and 1926, physicists debated whether de Broglie's proposal was merely mathematical poetry or a genuine description of nature.

Because if light, which is fundamentally a wave, can suddenly act like a solid, quantized particle, solid physical particles of matter suddenly act like waves.

A brilliant French physicist named Louis de Broglie asked that exact question.

De Broglie,

yeah.

If we look at the incredible journey we've taken today, we started with Max Planck's desperate mathematical hack, realizing that energy is chopped into tiny stair-step pixels.

That led to Einstein proving that light itself is made of photon bullets.

Which led Louis de Broglie to flip the script and realize that solid matter is actually a blurry wave of probability governed by the strict limits of Heisenberg's uncertainty.

We saw how that probability wave allows stars to burn through quantum tunneling and how it interferes with itself to create the mind bending results of the double slit experiment.

So the multiverse interpretation is one.

There's another interpretation called d- de Broglie–Bohm pilot waves, which actually is the one that I have a soft spot for.

Okay.

It says there's only one universe, and that when you get entangled particles, they can indeed communicate instantaneously.

Eoghe topped their group, 4-20.

De Broglie, 23 points.

So they hit the full six points.

Clooney, Quinn won 21.

And that's nineteen fifty-one, right? And then in nineteen fifty-two, uh, Bohm says, "All right, I need to do something more acceptable." And he starts working on a so-called hidden variables theory, and he finds it.

It turns out to be essentially what de Broglie had already presented it, it at, in Solvay in nineteen twenty-seven.

Uh, as far as I know, there's not any indication that Bohm knew about de Broglie's work.

I don't know that people had paid much attention to it.

It certainly fell out of favor very quickly, and de Broglie himself did not pursue it.

Um- Anyway, in 1927, de Broglie wasn't really prepared to answer technical questions, and he kind of fumbled a bit in Solvay and apparently was kind of embarrassed.

Young guy, you can imagine, among the great physicists of the time.

You can imagine that Bohm, having just written an entire textbook on quantum theory, was in a much better position to see how to make this theory work and how it would work in various well-known circumstances.