Beschreibung:

DE BROGLIE, LOUIS. 1892-1987. Autograph Scientific Manuscript Signed at the head ("Louis de Broglie") published as "L'univers a cinq dimensions et la mécanique ondulatoire" [in English: "The five-dimensional universe and wave mechanics"], in Le Journal de Physique et le Radium, Série VI, T. VIII, No. 2. (Paris: Société Générale d'Imprimerie, 1927), 13 pp, ink on lined paper written rectos only, 2 pp with additional corrections to the verso, autograph corrections and deletions by De Broglie throughout, pencil notes and corrections in a second hand throughout, bound in morocco-backed paper boards by Devauchelle.
Provenance: Sold Christies, Collection De Livres De Science Et De Medecine, Paris, June 25, 2004, lot 35.
DE BROGLIE ON WAVE MECHANICS TWO YEARS BEFORE HIS NOBEL PRIZE FOR HIS WORK ON THE SUBJECT. In 1923, de Broglie began working on reconciling Einstein and Planck's wave theories of radiation with extant theories on matter, and his doctorate thesis in 1924 Recherches sur la theory des quanta put forth his novel theory on the wave nature of electrons, creating an entire new and fertile field of physics: wave mechanics. Beginning with De Broglie, the years 1924-1927 saw an explosion of papers and research by Werner Heisenberg (quoted in the present manuscript), Max Born, and Ernst Schrodinger, culminating in the Solvay Conference of 1927, where De Broglie presented his "pilot wave" model. That same year the experiments of Davisson-Germer experiments confirmed De Broglie's theories.
Having set off the quantum wave revolution, in early 1927 De Broglie turned his attention to reconciling Einstein's general relativity with the new wave mechanics. Published in that pivotal year of 1927, this manuscript (and the resulting paper) expands upon ideas put forth by Kaluza-Klein-Kramer positing a fifth dimension as a means to accommodate general relativity within quantum theory. While the ideas would be taken up by Einstein in his search for a Unified Field Theory, and others, ultimately Einstein would abandon the exploration in a 1943 paper with Wolfgang Pauli. However, many of the tenets of this early work by Kaluza, Klein and De Broglie would be resurrected in the 1960s as the underpinnings for String Theory.
An important mansucript for the development of 20th-century physics as a whole by De Broglie, one of the primary contributors to the theoretical field.