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Introduction

The first issue of the Volume 30 of the Annales de la Fondation Louis de Broglie contains two interesting articles reviving an old ontological problem, that of the nature of de Broglie’s waves and, implicitly, of de Broglie’s frequency [1], [2]. This fact, corroborated with other previous attempts to offer a physical basis to the internal periodic phenomenon associated by de Broglie to a particle, shows that we still have to struggle in order to understand the intimate physical nature of this phenomenon, if it exists at all. The interesting thing is, however, that such subjects of thought are likely to attract old and respected theorists into debating, and our subject is no exception. Indeed, the mentioned issue of the Annales also contains a note by M. Georges Lochak [3], insisting on the meaning of frequency introduced by Louis de Broglie in his endeavor to comprehend the whole content of the idea of association wave – particle, thereby stressing the importance of a concerted experimental effort to unveil the physics underneath the association wave-particle. That, in itself, is indeed very important, for one can scarcely see in the literature lines of arguments in the old spirit of de Broglie, as it comes out of his works already cited by M. Lochak in his note.

Hoping to add in making the message behind the Louis de Broglie moment of human knowledge more accurate, this work presents another face of the de Broglie’s correspondence, more on the classical (as opposed to relativistic) side of the things, tracing back not to Einstein but to Lorentz, and suggesting an a priori description of quantization. A new look is also suggested for another important relation of de Broglie’s, namely that related to temperature, this time tracing back to Planck. One can thus understand that de Broglie’s idea of association wave-particle is a kind of fundamental principle ranking among the classical ones – Maupertuis, Fermat, Carnot – which de Broglie tried to put together. We may thus have here at least one reason for his undertaking of unifying the three fundamental classical principles into a single one.

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