Contemporary Advances in Physics, XIX, Fusion of Wave and Corpuscle Theories

OT quite five years ago I published in this journal an article entitled Waves and Quanta, expounding there the data which invited a corpuscular theory of light, regardless of the great array of classical phenomena of optics which demanded with no less insistence the long-triumphant undulatory theory. Today, not only are those data still extant and undeniable; they have been reinforced by observations on electron-streams which have compelled a wave-theory of free negative electricity, despite the very abundant evidence for free corpuscular electrons. Most physicists expect that not only light and negative electricity, but whatever other fundamentals there may be-- meaning, probably, positive electricity and nothing else--will be found to conform in some ways to simple wave-theory, and in some to simple particle-theory. Most physicists, I think, would concede that the two ideas must be forced into one scheme, whatever violence it may entail to others of our preconceptions, inborn or inbred. We must stretch the theories and our minds, so that corpuscles and waves shall appear no longer as alternatives of which election must be made, but as complementary aspects of one reality. To make a beginning with this process of stretching, I propose to treat some of the very simplest and most familiar of the phenomena, which up to lately have been interpreted by one only of the theories: phenomena such as the refraction of light in passing from air to water, the bending of the paths of electrons in passing from vacuum into metal, the diffraction of light and electrons from a ruled diffractiongrating.