Louis de Broglie

Louis Victor Pierre Raymond, 7th Duc de Broglie, was a French theoretical physicist and aristocrat who in his 1924 Ph.D. thesis postulated that electrons have wave nature and all matter has wave properties - the de Broglie hypothesis, a pillar of wave-particle duality. Experimental confirmation came in 1927, earning him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1929 and George Paget Thomson and Clinton Davisson the same prize a decade later. Erwin Schrödinger used de Broglie's wave theory to build wave mechanics; de Broglie himself presented the pilot-wave concept at the 1927 Solvay Conferences, then abandoned it until David Bohm revived the idea in 1952, prompting de Broglie to return in 1956 with a new version blending Bohm's work and Jean-Pierre Vigier's. He became the sixteenth member of the Académie française in 1944, served as Perpetual Secretary of the French Academy of Sciences, and was the first high-level scientist to call for a multi-national laboratory - the proposal that led to CERN.