Everything about Louis-victor De Broglie totally explained
Louis-Victor-Pierre-Raymond, 7th duc de Broglie (
August 15 1892 –
March 19 1987) was a
French physicist and a
Nobel laureate. He also served as Perpetual Secretary of the
Académie des sciences, France.
Biography
De Broglie was born in
Dieppe,
Seine-Maritime, younger son of
Victor, 5th duc de Broglie and a descendant of
Madame de Staël. In 1960, upon the death without heir of his older brother,
Maurice, 6th duc de Broglie, also a physicist, he became the 7th
duc de Broglie. He never married. When he died in
Louveciennes, he was succeeded as
duke by a distant cousin,
Victor-François, 8th duc de Broglie.
De Broglie had originally intended a career as a
humanist, and received his first degree in
history. Afterwards, though, he turned his attention toward mathematics and physics. With the outbreak of the
First World War in 1914, he offered his services to the army in the development of
radio communications.
Career
Unlike his brother Maurice, who was primarily an experimental physicist, de Broglie had the mind of a theorist. His 1924 doctoral thesis,
Recherches sur la théorie des quanta (Research on Quantum Theory), introduced his theory of electron waves. This included the
wave-particle duality theory of matter, based on the work of
Albert Einstein and
Planck. This research culminated in the
de Broglie hypothesis stating that
any moving particle or object had an associated wave. De Broglie thus created a new field in physics, the
mécanique ondulatoire, or wave mechanics, uniting the physics of light and matter. For this he won the
Nobel Prize in Physics in 1929. Among the applications of this work has been the development of
electron microscopes to get much better image resolution than optical ones, because of shorter wavelengths of electrons compared with
photon.
In his later career, de Broglie worked to develop a
causal explanation of wave mechanics, in opposition to the wholly
probabilistic models which dominate
quantum mechanical theory. Today, this explanation is known as the
de Broglie-Bohm theory, since it was refined by
David Bohm in the 1950s.
In addition to strictly scientific work, de Broglie thought and wrote about the
philosophy of science, including the value of modern scientific discoveries.
De Broglie became a member of the
Académie des sciences in 1933, and was the academy's perpetual secretary from 1942. On 12 October 1944, he was elected to the
Académie française, replacing mathematician
Émile Picard. Because of the deaths and imprisonments of Académie members during the occupation and other effects of the war, the Académie was unable to meet the quorum of twenty members for his election; due to the exceptional circumstances, however, his unanimous election by the seventeen members present was accepted. In an event unique in the
history of the Académie, he was received as a member by his own brother Maurice, who had been elected in 1934.
UNESCO awarded him the first
Kalinga Prize in 1952 for his work in popularizing scientific knowledge, and he was elected a Fellow of the
Royal Society on 23 April 1953. In 1961 he received the title of Knight of the Grand Cross in the
Légion d'honneur. De Broglie was awarded a post as counselor to the French High Commission of Atomic Energy in 1945 for his efforts to bring industry and science closer together. He established a center for applied mechanics at the
Henri Poincaré Institute, where research into optics, cybernetics, and atomic energy were carried out. He inspired the formation of the
International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science and was an early member.
Note on pronunciation
Note: in
French "de Broglie" is pronounced [dəbʁœj], which sounds close to "de Broy". This is an alteration of the
Italian pronunciation of "gl" (sound like "ll"); the original name was "Broglia", and was gallicized in 1654.
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Honours and awards
Publications
Recherches sur la théorie des quanta (Researches on the quantum theory), Thesis, Paris, 1924.
Ondes et mouvements (Waves and Motions). Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1926.
Rapport au 5e Conseil de Physique Solvay. Brussels, 1927.
La mécanique ondulatoire (Wave Mechanics). Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1928.
Matière et lumière (Matter and Light). Paris: Albin Michel, 1937.
Une tentative d'interprétation causale et non linéaire de la mécanique ondulatoire: la théorie de la double solution. Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1956.
- English translation: Non-linear Wave Mechanics: A Causal Interpretation. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1960.
Sur les sentiers de la science (On the Paths of Science).
Introduction à la nouvelle théorie des particules de M. Jean-Pierre Vigier et de ses collaborateurs. Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1961. Paris: Albin Michel, 1960.
- English translation: Introduction to the Vigier Theory of elementary particles. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1963.
Étude critique des bases de l'interprétation actuelle de la mécanique ondulatoire. Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1963.
- English translation: The Current Interpretation of Wave Mechanics: A Critical Study. Amsterdam, Elsevier, 1964.
Certitudes et incertitudes de la science (Certitudes and Incertitudes of Science). Paris: Albin Michel, 1966.Further Information
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