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Broglie, Louis-Victor Pierre Raymond, 7th Duc de 1892-1987
French physicist and Nobel Prize winner

Born in Dieppe, he studied history, but service at the Eiffel Tower radio station during World War I initiated his interest in science, and he took a doctorate at the Sorbonne (1924). Influenced by Einstein's work on the photoelectric effect which he interpreted as showing that waves can behave as particles, Broglie put forward the converse idea - that particles can behave as waves. The waves were detected experimentally by Clinton Davisson and Lester Germer in 1927, and separately by Sir George Thomson, and the idea of wave-particle duality was used by Erwin Schrödinger in his development of quantum mechanics. Broglie was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1929.