Louis de Broglie was the first to propose that particles can, in some circumstances, behave as waves. Born in Dieppe to an aristocratic French family, he first studied history at the Sorbonne in Paris. After a brief service with the radio station at the Eiffel Tower during the First World War, his interest was stimulated in science and he took a doctorate in physics, again at the Sorbonne (1924). Influenced by the work of Einstein on the photoelectric effect, de Broglie suggested in 1923 that particles, such as electrons, might in some circumstances behave as waves and, in consequence, be diffracted. This idea was not taken seriously by many of his colleagues, although Albert Einstein enthusiastically advocated that it should be tested experimentally. Within four years, Clinton Davisson and George Thomson produced separate electron diffraction patterns. These results clearly confirmed the experimental validity of de Broglie's ideas. In the meantime, Erwin Schrödinger had brilliantly proposed a partial differential equation that incorporated and generalized de Broglie's basic idea in order to provide a mathematical description of a quantum mechanical particle in terms of a wavefunction. The success of this equation attested to the brilliance of de Broglie's idea and his work was recognized in 1929 when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics. Throughout his life he was an influential thinker and he made many important contributions to fundamental thinking about physics. One of his most notable coinages is that of the term 'antiparticle', a word that he introduced in 1934.
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