Scion of one of France’s most illustrious dynasties, de Broglie grew up pampered by his elder sister, Princess Pauline, who adored him above all others, and described him in her memoirs as a slight, slender boy “with curly hair like a poodle, a small, cheery face, and eyes full of malice”. During his childhood, little Louis enjoyed a life of privilege and luxury, but was thoroughly ignored by his parents. His sister compensated for this lack of affection, and celebrated his every fancy: “He talked non-stop at the dining room table, and was incapable of holding his tongue, however much they yelled at him—and his remarks were irresistible! Raised in solitude, he had read a great deal and lived in a completely unreal world. He had a prodigious memory, and could recite entire scenes of classical theatre with inexhaustible flair, but he trembled in the most innocuous circumstances: pigeons terrified him, he was afraid of cats and dogs, and the sound of our father’s shoes climbing the stairs could send him into a panic.” As the boy showed a particular liking for history and politics (at just ten years old, he could recite the names of all the ministers of the Third Republic), his family presumed he would pursue a career in diplomacy, but he was soon seduced by the laboratory of his older brother, the experimental physicist Maurice de Broglie.
The laboratory took up the better part of one of his family’s mansions, and grew until it occupied an entire corner of Rue de Chateaubriand. In the stables where the thoroughbred horses had once slept, enormous X-ray generators now hummed, connected to the main laboratory via thick cables that ran through the porcelain in the guest bathroom and the priceless Gobelin tapestries that covered the walls of Maurice’s studio. The older brother had been left in charge of the little prince upon their father’s death. De Broglie began his scientific studies, and showed the same aptitude for the theoretical branch of physics that his brother Maurice had shown for the experimental. Still a student, he happened on the notes on quantum physics his brother had taken as secretary of the first Solvay Conference, the most prestigious scientific gathering in Europe. This apparently fortuitous event not only altered the course of his life, but even provoked an extraordinary change in his character, so that his sister Pauline hardly recognized him when she returned from her vacations in Italy: “The petit prince who entertained me throughout my childhood had entirely vanished. Now he lived in permanent isolation in a small room, immersed in a mathematics manual and chained to a repetitive and inflexible routine. With frightening speed, he had turned into an austere man leading a monastic life, and his right eyelid, which had always drooped a bit over his eye, now covered it almost completely, spoiling his looks in a way I deplored, as it accented his absent and effeminate air.”
In 1913, de Broglie made the horrific mistake of enlisting in the corps of engineers to fulfil his obligatory military service, unaware that just a couple of months later the First World War would break out. He would serve as a telegraph operator in the Eiffel Tower until the end of the conflict, maintaining the instruments used to intercept enemy messages. By nature a coward and a pacifist, de Broglie found army life more than he could bear, and in the years following the war he would complain bitterly of the effects of the European conflict on his mind, which, according to him, was never the same again.
The only one of his brothers in arms with whom he maintained relations was a young artist, Jean-Baptiste Vasek, de Broglie’s first true friend since his infancy, whose company had been his only source of amusement during the years of tedium they spent together up in the tower. After they were discharged, their friendship remained close and affectionate. Vasek was a painter, but he had also compiled an extensive collection of works he called art brut: poems, sculptures, drawings and paintings composed by psychiatric patients, mentally disabled children, drug addicts, alcoholics, perverts and sexual deviants, whose twisted visions, it seemed to him, bore the seeds from which the myths of the future would spring forth. De Broglie was never convinced of the possible utility of what Jean-Baptiste called “creative energy in its purest state”, but his dedication to art resembled Louis’s own monomaniacal devotion to physics, and they could spend whole afternoons conversing in one of the salons in de Broglie’s mansion, or else in tranquil silence, neither feeling the passage of time nor paying attention to what was occurring in the outside world.
De Broglie only realized how deeply he had fallen in love with his friend when the painter committed suicide. Vasek left no explanation for what he had done, just a note in which he begged his “dearest Louis” to guard his collection and, if at all possible, to continue building it, a final wish that Louis followed to the letter.
De Broglie abandoned his physics studies and focused his extraordinary willpower and considerable resources on continuing the project of his departed love. Using a part of his family inheritance, he visited all the asylums in France and many more across the continent, and bought whatever sort of art the patients were capable of making. Not only did he accept works already completed, he offered money in exchange for new pieces, bringing materials to the hospital directors and easing any resistance with bribes in cash or jewels from his mother’s collection. Nor did he stop there: when he had plundered the asylums, he established a foundation to work with children stricken with developmental difficulties, and, when he had exhausted the supply of children, he funded a scholarship for violent prisoners and sex offenders. Finally, he approached the Catholic charities and financed a home for beggars that would offer them food and lodging in exchange for a poem, a drawing or a musical score. Once he had filled the palace where the works were stored, and there was no room for another single piece of paper, he announced a grand exhibition, “La Folie des Hommes”, attributing its curatorship to his friend.
The inauguration brought together such a crowd that policemen had to disperse the onlookers who gathered at the gates of the property to prevent anyone from being crushed. The opinion of the critics was divided, with two irreconcilable factions: those who denounced the utter decadence the artistic world had plunged into, and those who applauded the birth of a new kind of art that made the experiments of the Dadaists look like parlour games for indolent poseurs. Even in a country like France, habituated to the eccentricities of what remained of its nobility, the exhibition was incomprehensible, and the rumour that Prince de Broglie had squandered his family fortune to pay homage to one of his lovers was on the lips of everyone in high society at that time. When de Broglie read an article that pitilessly mocked Jean-Baptiste’s paintings (which he had shown in a special room within the exhibition), he locked himself away in the building with the works of all the madmen in Europe, and for three months saw no one but his sister, who brought him dishes of food he would leave untouched outside the door.
Convinced that Louis’s intent was to let himself die from hunger, Pauline begged their older brother to intervene. Maurice beat on the door of the palace for twenty minutes without receiving a response, then returned and blew open the lock with a shotgun. He came in accompanied by five servants, ready to drag his brother off to a sanatorium, and strode shouting through the halls and rooms with their statues of rubbish, seeing for the first time the hellish scenes drawn in crayon, until he reached the main exhibition hall, where there was a perfect replica of the cathedral of Notre Dame—down to the features of its smallest gargoyle—wrought entirely in human faeces. Furious, he quickened his pace until he reached the bedroom on the top floor, where he had expected to find little Louis filthy and malnourished, if not dead, and was surprised to see him clad in a velvet suit, moustache and hair recently trimmed, smoking a thin cigarette with an immense smile across his face and his eyes beaming as they had when he was a child.
“Maurice,” de Broglie said, handing him a bundle of papers as naturally as if they had spent the afternoon together, “I need you to tell me if I’ve lost my mind.”
Two months later, Louis de Broglie presented the ideas that would win him his place in history. They were contained in his doctoral dissertation, which he entitled, with charac
teristic modesty, Research on the Theory of the Quanta. He defended it before an absolutely baffled jury from the university, in a monotonous tone that almost put them to sleep, and left the room without knowing if he was to be awarded his degree, as those meant to evaluate him were completely unable to grasp what they had just heard.
“Physics in its contemporary state contains false doctrines that exercise a dark influence on our imagination,” de Broglie declared in his high-pitched, nasal voice. “For more than a century, we have divided earthly phenomena into two fields: atoms and particles of solid matter on the one hand, and the intangible waves of light, propagated through the sea of the luminous ether, on the other. But these two systems cannot remain separate; we must bring them together in a single theory that explains their multiple interactions. Our colleague Albert Einstein has taken the first step in this direction; twenty years ago now, he postulated that light is not simply a wave, but contains particles of energy; these photons, which are nothing more than concentrated energy, travel within the waves of light. Many have doubted this idea’s veracity; others have tried to close their eyes so as not to see the new path forward it reveals to us. Because—let us not be mistaken—this is an incontestable revolution. We are talking here about the most precious object in physics, light, which allows us not only to see the forms of this world, but shows us the stars that adorn the spiral arms of the galaxy and the hidden heart of matter. But this object is not singular—it is double. Light exists in two different ways. Thus, it transcends all the categories with which we have tried to encapsulate the myriad forms of nature. As wave and as particle, it inhabits two distinct orders and is possessed of identities as opposed as the two faces of Janus. Like that Roman god, it expresses the contradictory properties of what is discrete and what is continuous, what is local and what is spread out. Those opposed to this revelation argue that accepting such a novel orthodoxy demands a departure from reason. To them I say the following: all matter is possessed of such dualism! Not only light but each of the atoms with which the godhead has constructed the universe is subject to this twofold nature. The thesis you hold in your hands makes plain that for each particle of matter—electron or proton—there exists an associated wave that transports it through space. I realize many of you will doubt my reasoning. I confess that it is the fruit of solitude. I admit its character is bizarre, and I accept whatever calumny may come to me if it is shown to be false. And yet today I say to you with absolute certainty that all things can exist in two ways, and that nothing is as solid as it appears; the stone in the child’s hand, which he aims at the idle sparrow on its branch, could run like water between his fingers.”
De Broglie had lost his mind.
When Einstein proposed the “particle-wave duality” in 1905, everyone thought he had gone too far. But light is immaterial, his critics reasoned, so perhaps it can exist in this strange form. Matter, on the other hand, was solid. That it should behave like a wave was inconceivable. The two things could not be more opposed. A particle of matter, in the end, is like a tiny grain of gold: it exists in a determinate space and occupies only that one place in the world. Its precise location can be ascertained from one minute to the next, because its matter is concentrated. For this same reason, such a body propelled forwards will bounce back if it encounters an obstacle, and will always land at a specific point. Waves, on the other hand, are like the waters of the sea, grand and capacious, outstretched along an endless surface, and, in this way, exist in multiple positions simultaneously: if a wave crashes against a rock, it can surround it and continue on its way. If two come into contact from opposite directions, they may counteract each other and dissipate or else continue on their same path unaffected. And when a wave breaks on the coast, it strikes numerous places on the beach, not all at the same time. The two phenomena are in essence opposed, contradictory, their behaviour antagonistic, and yet, according to de Broglie, all atoms were—like light—both wave and particle, at times acting like the first, at times like the second.
De Broglie’s affirmations were so incongruous with the received wisdom of his age that the jury was uncertain how to evaluate his proposal. Rarely did a doctoral thesis oblige them to conceive of matter in a radically new way. Their ranks included three luminaries from the Sorbonne—the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Jean Baptiste Perrin, the renowned mathematician Élie Cartan and the crystallographer Charles-Victor Maugin—as well as Paul Langevin, an invited professor from the Collège de France. But none of them could understand young de Broglie’s revolutionary ideas. Maugin refused to accept the existence of waves of matter; Perrin wrote to Maurice de Broglie, who was anxious to know whether Louis had obtained his doctorate, confessing that “all I can tell you is your little brother is very intelligent.” Nor did Langevin know what to say, and he sent a copy of the dissertation to Albert Einstein to see whether the pope of physics was capable of grasping what the prim Frenchman had proposed.
Einstein did not respond.
When months had passed, Langevin worried his message had been lost in the post. Under pressure from the Sorbonne, which demanded a definitive verdict, he sent a second letter to inquire whether Einstein had found the time to read the thesis and whether any of it made sense to him.
His answer arrived two days later, and meant the immediate consecration of de Broglie, whose work Einstein saw as the beginning of a new way forward for physics: “He has lifted a corner of the great veil. This is the first weak beam of light to penetrate the dilemma of the quantum world, the most terrible of our generation.”
III
PEARLS IN HIS EARS
A year later, de Broglie’s dissertation reached the hands of a brilliant but failed physicist in whose mind the waves of matter grew to monstrous proportions.
In the interwar period, Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger suffered many of the afflictions that plagued Europe as a whole: he went bankrupt, fell ill with tuberculosis, and in a matter of years had lived through the decline and death of his father and grandfather, along with a series of personal and professional humiliations that had ruined a once promising career.
By comparison, the Great War had been relatively calm for him. In 1914, he joined the Austro-Hungarian army as an officer and was sent to command a small artillery unit on the plains of Veneto. Schrödinger left for Italy armed with two pistols he had paid for from his own pocket, but he never had occasion to use them. He was transferred to a fortress in the mountains of Alto Adige in the north of the country, where he enjoyed the fresh highland air while two thousand metres below him countless soldiers had begun to dig the trenches they would die in.
His only real moment of fright took place during the ten days he spent as a lookout in one of the towers of the fortress. Schrödinger fell asleep gazing at the stars, and, when he awoke, he saw a trail of lights advancing over the mountainside. He leapt up and calculated, based on the stretch of land they occupied, that they were a force of at least two hundred men—three times larger than his own company. He was so afraid of engaging in real combat that he ran from one side of the room to the other, unable to recall what sort of alarm he was supposed to sound. When he went to ring the bell, he realized the lights were perfectly still, and when he spied them through his binoculars he saw they were Saint Elmo’s Fire: flickers of plasma that enveloped the tips of the barbed wire surrounding the fortress, which were charged with static electricity from an approaching storm. Utterly bewitched, Schrödinger gazed at the blue lights until the last of them vanished, and, for the rest of his life, he would pine for that strange luminescence.
He spent the war with no occupation for his mind, awaiting orders that did not come and filling out reports no one read, until he fell into a state of extreme apathy. His staff complained that Schrödinger would not rise before lunchtime and then took naps that lasted the entire afternoon. He felt groggy throughout the day and could not bear to remain standing for more than five minutes at a time. He seemed to have forgotten the names of
his comrades, as though a poisonous, corrosive miasma had invaded his mind. Although he tried to use the dead hours to page through the physics articles his colleagues sent him from Austria, he was incapable of concentrating; one thought ran into the next, and he had the sense that the tedium of war was spawning a long-dormant psychosis in him. “Sleep, eat, play cards. Sleep, eat, play cards. Is this a life?” he wrote in his diary. “I no longer ask myself when the war will be over. I ask whether it is at all possible for a thing such as this to end.” When Germany signed the armistice in November 1918, Schrödinger returned to a Vienna besieged by hunger.
In the years to come, he saw the world in which he had grown up crumble apart: the emperor was deposed, Austria became a republic, and his mother lived out the final years of her life in wretched penury, her body consumed by the cancer that had taken root in one of her breasts. Schrödinger was unable to save his family’s linoleum factory, which shut down as a result of the economic blockade the English and French upheld even after the cessation of hostilities. The victorious powers watched unmoved as the Austro-Hungarian Empire disintegrated and millions of people struggled to survive without nourishment or coal to stay warm through winter. The streets of Vienna filled with mutilated soldiers who had brought back with them the spectres of the battlefield; their nerves, damaged by gas in the trenches, twisted their faces into ghoulish grimaces, spasms shook their muscles, rattling the medals that hung from their tattered uniforms and making them chime like the bells in a leper colony. Control of the population was left in the hands of an army whose soldiers were as weak and famished as those they were meant to govern; fat white maggots infested their rations of meat, less than a hundred grams per person per day. When the troops distributed what little foodstuffs arrived in their country from Germany, total chaos ensued: during one of the disturbances, Schrödinger watched the mob knock a policeman from his horse. In five minutes, the beast was dismembered by a hundred women, who flocked around the cadaver to tear away the very last strips of its flesh.
When We Cease to Understand the World Page 9