Louis de Broglie

This radical materialist worldview had dominated and undergirded the entire sense of reality on the part of our Western civilization, at least, ever since 1647, even though it had been destabilized, that worldview, by the discoveries that were made between 1923 and 1927 in the realm of quantum physics.

These were the discoveries that were made by Louis de Broglie, Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Max Born, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, this group of people, the physicists that were, that because they had gained access to the electron diffraction apparatus, a microscope that was able to see down into the inner workings of the atomic structure of matter, that they began to discover that there were limitations on the clarity of the assertions that were being made by the scientific materialist worldview of Descartes and Newton.

This earlier enlightened scientific worldview, as I say, had purportedly established as a fact that our material universe works entirely separately and distinct from any consciousness on our part, any human intentions at all, that our physical universe runs like a machine, like a clockwork machine, and it's governed exclusively by the predetermined laws of physics, and that this had provided a convincing operational systematic worldview, free of superstition and magic, and that this had lasted since actually 1687.

I said 1647, it's 1687, with Newton's publication of his Principa, that this had set aside or had established the classical deterministic physics, the absolute framework for understanding the functioning of our material universe.

His son, by the way, is the singer of the band Eels.

This goes back to Louis de Broglie in 1927, and it was worked out fully in 1952 by an American, David Bohm.

It's called the pilot wave theory.

There's a real wave and there's a real particle.

This is where I need the click.

Remember de Broglie.

A particle is associated with a wave.

And he gave the rule for it.

The real answer took ten more years, and it came from an unexpected direction.

Louis de Broglie was a French aristocrat, properly a prince, from one of the grandest families in France.

His first degree was in medieval history.

Then came the war, which he spent as a radio operator, stationed for much of it at the top of the Eiffel Tower.