BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
PRODID:UW-Madison-Physics-Events
BEGIN:VEVENT
SEQUENCE:0
UID:UW-Physics-Event-2614
DTSTART:20120420T170500Z
DURATION:PT1H0M0S
DTSTAMP:20260420T062359Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20120216T174302Z
LOCATION:2241 Chamberlin Hall
SUMMARY:Matter waves in Paris:  the de Broglie you don't know\, Specia
 l Physics History Lecture\, Bruce R. Wheaton\, Technology & Physical S
 cience History Associates\, Berkeley\, CA
DESCRIPTION:IT IS WELL KNOWN that Louis de Broglie received the 1929 N
 obel Prize for his audacious proposal six years earlier that atoms pos
 sess a wave component.  Less well known is his motivation and justific
 ation for this concept.
\n
\nIt occurred within the context of the fir
 st industrial electronics research laboratory in France\, where numero
 us aspirants learned new techniques to be applied in French industries
  for process management\, product sampling\, lubrication studies\, and
  a panoply of new control mechanisms.  This Laboratoire francaise des 
 rayons x was created after WWI in the fashionable 8th arrondissement o
 f Paris by Louis' elder brother Maurice.
\n
\nOf distinctly noble stat
 us and possessing immense wealth\, Maurice did this strictly as amateu
 r and utilized his noblesse to form the necessary partnerships with re
 calcitrant French industrialists.  But in the process\, which led amon
 g many things to the first electron microscope intended for study of i
 ndustrial procedure\, Maurice and his student Alexandre Dauvillier red
 iscovered an enigma in the behavior of x-rays.  When x-rays strike mat
 ter they release electrons whose velocities can easily be measured.  T
 he problem they found was that these velocities were virtually equal t
 o the velocities of the cathode beam that produced the x-rays.  As W. 
 H. Bragg put it "it is as if a log falls in the sea\, and the waves th
 at result concentrate themselves on another log a thousand miles away 
 sufficient to propel that log up into the air."
\n
\nTo answer this co
 nundrum\, "little Louis" appealed to Einstein's theory of relativity a
 nd came up with his pilot wave hypothesis of matter in 1923.  That it 
 happened in the physics backwater of France owes much to the pragmatic
  atmosphere in his brother's lab where he could find nobody to test it
  because they were too busy trying to invent television.
URL:https://www.physics.wisc.edu/events/?id=2614
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR