DeBroglie, Louis

De Moivre, Abraham 13n deBroglie, Louis 97n Debye, Petrus 344n Descartes, Rend 63n Dewar, Sir James 316n Dirac, PAM 264n... 

Max Planck noted that in certain situations, energy possessed particlelike properties. A French physicist, Louis deBroglie, hypothesized that the reverse could be true as well Electrons could, at times, behave as waves rather than particles. This is known today as deBroglie s wave-particle duality. 

And what does that mean In the 1920s Louis DeBroglie described electrons as both particles and waves because they have precise mass, go splat-splat-splat (or click-click-click ) into Geiger counters yet show interference like radio and light waves. It is one thing to say particle-waves and quite another to really picture them. Try it. Our problem is that electrons are outside of both our direct senses and experiences. As Bronowski notes, twentieth-century physics introduced abstraction and uncertainty and the need for what he describes as tolerance in modeling nature." The nineteenth-century satire Flatland by Shakespearean scholar Edwin A. Abbott illustrates our limitations. ... 

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