Louis de Broglie was born into an aristocratic family. He studied history at the Sorbonne but then switched to physics. During World War I, he served at a radio station, which sparked his interest in electromagnetic waves. In 1924, in his doctoral dissertation, he advanced the hypothesis of wave properties of matter, which was initially met with skepticism, but after experimental confirmation of electron diffraction, it earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics (1929). Subsequently, he worked on the interpretation of quantum mechanics, developing the pilot-wave theory, an alternative to the Copenhagen interpretation.