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Two important events in the history of physical sciences occurred re cently: the fiftieth anniversary of Quantum Mechanics and the Jubilee of Louis de Broglie's celebrated Thesis. These events occurred in the same period of time when the world honored de Broglie on the occa sion of his eightieth birthday. Some of de Broglie's friends, former students, and some people who used to know him and appreciate his personality decided to prepare an international volume for this cele brated occasion. Such a task was not very easy. It is always simpler to contribute in honor of famous people whose works and impact were great on a tech nical and pragmatic level than to contribute in honor of a person whose achievements were not only dominant in physical sciences themselves, but also had many important implications for the development of the whole branch of philosophy of sciences. Louis de Broglie, the man to whom we owe among other things the most fundamental notion of duality between waves and particles, be longs in a way to the Einsteinian school of thought. He never accepted literally the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. To him it was clear that this interpretation makes quantum mechanics incomplete and highly non-deterministic. He always believed that since the duality between waves and particles was an experimental fact, there should be some manifestation of the Schrodinger wave itself in the realistic world. De Broglie had to struggle much for this idea, which he never gave up.
List of contents
On the Creation of a Deeper Insight Into What May Underlie Quantum Physical Law.- The Measurement Theory of Everett and de Broglie's Pilot Wave.- Quantum Mechanics and Determinism.- On Hidden Variables and Quantum Mechanical Probabilities.- Experimental Status of Hidden Variable Theories.- Pre-Quantum Mechanics Introduction to Models with Hidden Variables.- On the Foundations of Quantum Physics.- Quantum Logic: Is It Necessarily Orthocomplemented ?.- The Stochastic Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics and the Theory of Measurement.- Statistical Ensembles in Quantum Mechanics.- Conditional Probability in Wave Mechanics.- Classical Electrodynamics in Terms of a Direct Interparticle Hamiltonian.- Theory of One-Dimensional Relativistic Elastic Continuum for the Model of Particles and Resonances.- On the Photon Theory of L. de Broglie.- From the Photon to the Graviton and to a General Theory of Corpuscular Waves.- Possible Implications of de Broglie's Wave-Mechanical Theory of Photon Behaviour.- Index of Names.
