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He was born in Dieppe ( Seine-Maritime), younger son of Victor, 5th duc de Broglie. 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 ( Yvelines), he was succeded as duke by a distant cousin, Victor-François, 8th duc de Broglie.
He had originally intended a career as a humanistThrough the humanities we reflect on the fundamental question: What does it mean to be human? The humanities offer clues but never a complete answer. They reveal how people have tried to make moral, spiritual, and intellectual sense of a world in which ir, and received his first degree in historyHistory is often used as a generic term for information about the past, such as in "geologic history of the Earth". When used as the name of a field of study, history refers to the study and interpretation of the record of human societies. The term histor. Afterwards, though, he turned his attention—probably under his brother's influence—toward mathematics and physics. With the outbreak of the First World War in 1914Events January 4 77 seal hunters freeze to death on ice near Labrador January 5 Ford Motor Company announces an eight-hour workday and a minimum wage of $5 for a day's labor February 13 Copyright: In New York City the ASCAP (for American Society of Compos, he offered his services to the army in the development of radioFor other uses see: radio (disambiguation Radio is a technology that allows the transmission of signals by modulation of electromagnetic waves with frequencies below those of light. Radio waves Radio waves are a form of electromagnetic radiation, and are communications.
Unlike his brother Maurice, who was primarily an experimental physicist, Louis de Broglie had the mind of a theoretician rather than that of an experimenter or engineer. His 1924Centuries: 19th century 20th century 21st century Decades: 1870s 1880s 1890s 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s Years: 1919 1920 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 See also 1924 in aviation 1924 in film 1924 in literature 1924 in mu doctoral thesis, Recherches sur la théorie des quanta (Research on Quantum Theory), introduced his theory of electron waves. This included the wave-particle dualityIn physics, wave-particle duality holds that light and matter simultaneously exhibit properties of waves and of particles (or photons). This concept is a consequence of quantum mechanics. Fresnel, Maxwell, and Young In the early 1800s, the double-slit exp theory of matter, based on the work of Einstein and Planck. This research culminated in the de Broglie hypothesis stating that any moving particle or object had an associated wave. Louis 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 photons.
In his later career, Louis de Broglie worked to develop a causal explanation of wave mechanics, in opposition to the wholly probabilistic models which dominate quantum mechanical theory.
In addition to strictly scientific work, Louis de Broglie thought and wrote about the philosophy of science, including the value of modern scientific discoveries.
Louis 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 of London on 23 April 1953. In 1961 he received the title of Knight of the Grand Cross in the Légion d'honneur.