The Story

Propose by Louis de Broglie in 1924, the wave-matter dualism was intended to extend to material particles the Einsteinian hypothesis on the dual wave and corpuscular character of electromagnetic radiation. In its essential lines, dualism assigns to light and material particles a dual wave and corpuscular nature, thus justifying the simultaneous use of conceptually and formally different theories such as Relativity and Wave Mechanics.

From 1927, dualism underwent rigorous experimental testing using both beams of light and material particles. However, the results have always confirmed two different physical realities that can be thus synthesized:

(a) the photoelectric effect studied by Einstein (1905) and the Compton effect (1923), highlight how at the microscopic level the energy and momentum of a light signal cannot take on any value, but only multiple values of discrete quantities. Light is therefore formed by elementary corpuscles, photons, with energy and momentum proportional to the frequency of electromagnetic radiation emitted;

(b) the analysis of the image produced in the overlap of two secondary beams of light or material particles of equal energy, produced by the subdivision of the same primary beam, shows independently of the original nature of the beam used and by its intensity, the formation of an interference figure consisting of a succession of light and dark bands. This figure is justifiable only if the light or matter of the beam propagates in the form of waves. In addition, the reduction in the intensity of the primary beam to near-zero values shows that the interference figure occurs independently of the intensity value but is formed in the overlap of a very large number of point impacts, typical of a corpuscular and non-undulating nature of matter and light.

While the result (a) confirms the principle of energy quantization introduced by Max Planck in 1900, highlighting for light a corpuscular and non-wave nature as predicted by Maxwell's electromagnetic theory, the result (b) clearly highlights for both light and matter a dual wave and corpuscular nature. 
To date, all experiments have always confirmed the hypothesis introduced by de Broglie, allowing physics to accept beyond all possible and reasonable doubts quantization and wave-particle dualism as founding principles of quantum thought and any other contemporary development.

In 1983, fifty-nine years after the publication of his work, Louis de Broglie wrote in an article published in "Histoire Générale des Sciences" [1],  about that epic period of the history of physics, he wrote: " The essential purpose ... was to arrive at a synthetic theory of waves and matter in which the corpuscles appeared as a particular behavior of a wave structure controlled by its propagation ... some indications suggested precisely this path: the theory Hamilton-Jacobi, developed ... in the context of classical analytical mechanics seemed to indicate a close relationship between the movements of the material points and the propagation of a wave; the intervention of integers in the quantization formulas of the old quantum quantum theory suggested that the phenomena of interference or resonance occurred in the stability of the motions of atomic electrons, etc. Taking inspiration from these particularities, I was able to lay the first foundations of wave mechanics and obtain with the help of relativistic concepts, the relationships that link the energy and momentum of a corpuscle to the frequency and wavelength that the mechanics hypotheses wave led to associate it ...".

In an age of strong changes in physical thought and transition between the determinism of mechanics and the indeterminism typical of wave phenomena, Louis de Broglie could not even do without facing the study of the new quantum phenomenology, without attempting the path of mediation between the most current, brilliant and conceptually incompatible theories of his era. In fact, it is precisely their natural mutual conceptual and formal incompatibility, especially with regard to the spatial location of a particle as opposed to the non-location of the wave that describes it, that forces us to accept the dogma of dualism, as the only possible way to understand and describe otherwise inexplicable phenomena.

A year after de Broglie's article, at a conference of Quantum Mechanics held in Amalfi, Jhon Bell, who had been entrusted with the task of concluding the conference with a speech, said: "... we are in the presence of a clear profound incompatibility between the two pillars on which contemporary science is based, (the Theory of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics). I look forward to the roundtables in which the shocking technical details of the latest developments will be left to reflect on this strange situation. Perhaps a true synthesis between Quantum Mechanics and the Theory of Relativity needs not only technical progress but a radical conceptual renewal."  Renewal that has its roots in the theorem due to Bell, which shows how two identical particles are always related regardless of the distance that separates them. Suppose we have a system with two particles, for example two electrons of opposite spin, one up and one down. If we use a magnetic field to change the spin orientation of one of the two particles, the spin of the other also changes accordingly in the opposite direction.  This seemingly disconcerting result was confirmed by two historical experiments, the first performed in 1972 by John Clauser and Stuart Freeman in the United States and the second in 1981 by A. Aspect, P. Grangier and C. Roger at CERN. As inconceivable as it may seem, there is a form of instant communication between the two particles, such that by changing the spin of one, the spin of the other also changes. The concept of "instant" change, however, implies the existence of a form of communication at infinite speed between particles, a phenomenon absolutely not in accordance with the fundamental principle of Relativity which stipulates that the speed of light is an impassable limit in the transmission of energy, but at the basis of all the current experiments of teleportation of matter, in which through the process of entanglement it is possible to remotely replicate photons, particles and atoms, destroying the originals and recreating others in another place with the same characteristics. A phenomenon that Albert Einstein amused to mock, calling it "ghost remote action ". 

The conceptual and phenomenological rupture between relativistic physics and quantum physics is therefore a sure element of disturbance in the context of contemporary physics. Precisely the phenomenon of wave-corpuscle dualism could in fact be the border between the microscopic world, obedient to the laws of quantum mechanics and the macroscopic world governed by the laws of mechanics, electromagnetism and gravity. A border that hides perhaps the true nature of matter? The challenge is to find this border and bring it down.

Bibliography

[1] Louis de Broglie. “Histoire Générale des Sciences”. Tomo III, Vol II. Presses Universitaires de France – Paris (1983).


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