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In the late 17th century, Sir Isaac Newton had advocated that light was corpuscular (particulate), but Christiaan Huygens took an opposing wave description. While Newton had favored a particle approach, he was the first to attempt to reconcile both wave and particle theories of light, and the only one in his time to consider both, thereby anticipating modern wave-particle duality.
[3] [4] [5] Thomas Young's experiment with light was part of classical physics long before the development of quantum mechanics and the concept of wave–particle duality. He believed it demonstrated that the Christiaan Huygens' wave theory of light was correct, and his experiment is sometimes referred to as Young's experiment [6] or Young's ...
This concept is known as the de Broglie hypothesis, an example of wave-particle duality, and forms a central part of the theory of quantum mechanics. De Broglie won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1929, after the wave-like behaviour of matter was first experimentally demonstrated in 1927.
Young and Fresnel showed that Huygens' wave theory (in his Treatise on Light) could explain that colour is the visible manifestation of light's wavelength. Physicists today attribute both a corpuscular and undulatory character to light—comprising the wave–particle duality.
Another issue of importance where Bohr and Heisenberg disagreed is wave–particle duality. Bohr maintained that the distinction between a wave view and a particle view was defined by a distinction between experimental setups, whereas Heisenberg held that it was defined by the possibility of viewing the mathematical formulas as referring to ...
Since 1927, at the Solvay Conference in Austria, European physicists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries realized that the interpretations of their experiments with light and electricity required a different theory to explain why light behaves both as a wave and particle. The implications were profound.
The theory was historically developed in the 1920s by de Broglie, who, in 1927, was persuaded to abandon it in favour of the then-mainstream Copenhagen interpretation. David Bohm, dissatisfied with the prevailing orthodoxy, rediscovered de Broglie's pilot-wave theory in 1952.
The ensemble approach differs significantly from the Copenhagen approach in its view of diffraction. The Copenhagen interpretation of diffraction, especially in the viewpoint of Niels Bohr, puts weight on the doctrine of wave–particle duality. In this view, a particle that is diffracted by a diffractive object, such as for example a crystal ...