CREATING QUANTUM MECHANICS

BROGLIE, L. DE.

Waves and Quanta.

London, Macmillan & Co., 1923.

Royal8vo. Bound with the original wrappers (in the back) in publisher's pictorial cloth. Gilt lettering and Nature's logo to spines and front board. In "Nature", July - December, 1923, Vol. CXII [12]. Entire volumes offered. "Emmanuel College" in gilt lettering to spines. Two library stamps to title-page and first index page. A small tear to top of spine and signs after removal of label to spine. Very slight wear to extremities, otherwise a fine and clean copy. Rare in the publisher's binding. P. 540. [Entire volume: LIV, 960 pp. + advertisements and wrappers].

The important Nature-printing - a summary of his three papers published in "Comptes rendus" the same year - of De Broglie's landmark discovery of the wave nature of matter. "In order to reach an audience wider than the limited readership of the Comptes rendus, de Broglie arranged the publication of a summary of his results in Nature(October 1923)." (DSB).

His discovery established a new era in physics by introducing the epochal new principle that particle-wave duality should apply not only to radiation but also to matter and thus creating quantum mechanics. It was extended to form his doctoral thesis of 1924 "Recherches sur la Théorie des Quanta."

De Broglie relates "After long reflection in solitude and meditation, I suddenly had the idea, during the year 1923, that the discovery made by Einstein in 1905 should be generalized by extending it to all material particles and notably to electrons" (Preface to his PhD thesis 1924).

"He made the leap in his September 10, 1923, paper: E=hv should hold not only for photons but also for electrons, to which he assigns a 'fictitious associated wave'. In his September 24 paper, he indicated the direction in which one 'should seek experimental confirmations of our ideas': a stream of electrons traversing an aperture whose dimensions are small compared with the wavelenght of the electron waves 'should show diffraction phenomena' ."(Pais "Subtle is the Lord", pp. 425-436).

In the third paper (October 8) he discusses "The interplay between the propagation of the particle and of the waves could be expressed in more formal terms as an identity between the fundamental variational principles of Pierre de Fermat (rays), and Pierre Louis Maupertuis (particles) as de Broglie discussed it further in his last communication . Therein he also considered some thermodynamic consequences of his generalized wave-particle duality. He showed in particular how one could, using Lord Rayleigh's 1900 formula for the number of stationary modes for phase waves, obtain Planck's division of the mechanical phase space into quantum cells.

Louis de Broglie achieved a worldwide reputation for his discovery of the wave theory of matter, for which he received the Nobel Prize for physics in 1929. His work was extended into a full-fledged wave mechanics by Erwin Schrödinger and thus contributed to the creation of quantum mechanics. After an early attempt to propose a deterministic interpretation of his theory, de Broglie joined the Copenhagen school's mainstream noncausal interpretation of the quantum theory."(DSB).

"This idea [i.e. de Broglie's that matter might behave as waves] was tested and confirmed by Davisson and Germer in 1927... Thus the duality of both light and matter had been established, and physicists had to come to terms with fundamental particles which defied simple theories and demanded two sets of 'complementary' descriptions, each applicable under certain circumstances, but incompatible with one another." (Printing and the Mind of Man, 417).

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