You're Not a Thing. You're a Relationship.
What if everything you thought you knew about solid, tangible matter was beautifully, radically wrong? Welcome to FreeAstroScience.com — where we take the strangest ideas in science and make them feel like home. Today, we're looking at a question that kept a French aristocrat awake at night in 1924, inspired a female philosopher to challenge the greatest minds of the 20th century, and still has the power to shift how you see yourself and the world around you. Stay with us to the end. This one's worth it.
Is Anything Actually Solid?
Pick up a coffee mug. It feels solid, right? Heavy, fixed, real. That mug seems like a thing. A well-defined object with edges, mass, and a permanent address in space.
Physics would like a word with you about that.
At the quantum level — the level of electrons, quarks, and the building blocks your mug is assembled from — nothing sits still. Nothing is truly isolated. The particles inside that ceramic don't just exist on their own. They exist in relation to everything around them. Remove the interactions, and in a very real sense, there's no particle left to speak of.
This isn't poetic license. It's what a century of physics has been quietly, stubbornly telling us.
"Matter is not made of things. It is made of relationships." — Matter is Not Made Up of Things, the text behind this article
That single sentence overturns 2,500 years of Western thinking. And we think it's one of the most liberating ideas in the history of science.
Who Was Louis de Broglie, and Why Does His Idea Still Matter?
Here's a man who didn't fit the expected mold. De Broglie was a French aristocrat from an old Piedmontese family, educated in elegant Parisian salons, who decided to step into territory dominated by giants like Einstein and Planck. In 1924, he submitted a doctoral dissertation that made his examiners raise their eyebrows.
His claim? Light wasn't the only thing that behaved like both a wave and a particle. All matter did. Every electron. Every proton. Technically, every coffee mug — though the wave-like effects for large objects are so tiny they're practically unmeasurable.
Einstein, asked to evaluate the dissertation, called it "a first feeble ray of light on this worst of our physics enigmas." High praise, considering the source.
Three years later, in 1927, two independent experiments — by C. J. Davisson and George Paget Thomson — confirmed it. Electrons fired at a crystal diffracted exactly like waves. De Broglie was right. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1929, making him the first person to earn a Nobel for a PhD thesis.
What he'd actually done was wider than explaining electrons. He'd proposed that the line between wave and particle — between energy and matter — was not a wall. It was a doorway, swinging both ways.
What Does λ = h/p Actually Mean?
De Broglie's most famous contribution is a beautifully compact equation. Don't let it scare you — we'll break it down piece by piece.
| Symbol | Name | What it means | Value / Unit |
|---|---|---|---|
| λ | Wavelength (lambda) | The "size" of the wave associated with a particle — how spread out it is in space | Meters (m) |
| h | Planck's constant | A fundamental constant of nature that sets the scale of the quantum world | 6.626 × 10⁻³⁴ J·s |
| p | Momentum | Mass multiplied by velocity — how "heavy and fast" the particle is | kg·m/s |
The equation says: the heavier and faster an object is, the shorter its wavelength. An electron has a tiny mass, so its wavelength is large enough to detect — and that's exactly what Davisson confirmed in 1927. Your coffee mug? Its wavelength is so absurdly small (around 10⁻³⁴ meters) that no instrument in existence could measure it. But in principle, it's there.
That "in principle" is everything. It means the wave-particle line was never real. We drew it out of convenience, not out of nature's instructions.
The Philosopher They Ignored for 80 Years
While de Broglie was reshaping physics from the laboratory side, a young German woman was doing something equally radical from the philosophical side. Her name was Grete Hermann, and in 1935 she wrote what historians now call one of the finest philosophical treatments of quantum mechanics ever produced.
Hermann had a double background — rigorous mathematics and equally rigorous philosophy. She worked alongside Werner Heisenberg in Leipzig, examined the uncertainty principle with unusual depth, and arrived at a conclusion that challenged the field's most respected figure at the time: John von Neumann.
Von Neumann had published a "proof" that hidden variables — underlying, deterministic causes for quantum randomness — were logically impossible. Hermann found a clear flaw in the argument. She published her finding in 1935. Almost nobody read it.
It took until 1966, when physicist John Bell independently discovered the same gap, for the physics community to take notice. By then, Hermann had moved into political activism and educational philosophy. She never received the credit she deserved during her lifetime.
Her central insight connects directly to our theme today. Hermann proposed that quantum mechanics doesn't destroy causality — it reframes it. Reality isn't a collection of independent objects with fixed properties. It's a web of interactions, where the meaning of a measurement depends irreducibly on the context in which it's made.
"A hundred years ago, Grete Hermann had already understood this, with a clarity that still shines today: reality is not a collection of isolated objects, but a web of connections." — Matter is Not Made Up of Things
Classical Physics vs. Quantum Reality: The Big Shift
To feel the full weight of what de Broglie and Hermann changed, it helps to see the before-and-after side by side. Classical physics wasn't wrong, exactly — it works brilliantly for everyday objects. But it made assumptions about reality that quantum mechanics gently, persistently dismantled.
| Concept | Classical Physics | Quantum Mechanics |
|---|---|---|
| Nature of matter | Discrete, solid particles with definite positions and velocities | Wave-like probability distributions; position is uncertain until measured |
| Wave vs. particle | Strictly separate categories | Every entity is both wave and particle; context determines which appears |
| Reality between measurements | Objects have definite properties at all times | Properties are relational — they emerge from interactions, not isolation |
| Causality | Strict determinism — know the initial state, predict all future states | Statistical predictions; determinism of individual events is debated |
| Observer's role | Passive recorder — observing doesn't change reality | Measurement interacts with the system and changes its state |
| Identity of a particle | Fixed and independent of surroundings | Defined by interactions and relationships with its environment |
Notice that last row. Classical physics gave particles a fixed identity, like a passport photo — always the same face. Quantum mechanics says identity is more like a conversation. It depends on who's in the room.
So What Is Matter, Really?
Here's the idea at the heart of this article, stated as plainly as we can manage it.
An electron doesn't exist in isolation the way a marble does. It doesn't sit in space with a fixed position, waiting to be found. Instead, it exists as what physicists call a wave function — a spread of possibilities, a cloud of potential states. When it interacts with something else — a detector, another particle, a field — one of those possibilities becomes real. The others vanish.
The interaction is the event. The relationship is the reality.
We are, at our deepest level, exactly this. You are not a fixed object moving through time. You are a temporary configuration of quantum relationships — atoms forged in stellar furnaces billions of years ago, assembled by gravity and chemistry and biology into something that reads science blogs on a Monday morning and occasionally wonders what it all means.
That's not a reason to feel small. It's a reason to feel connected.
Gabriella Greison and the Wavelength of Happiness
The interview that sparked this article appeared in La Stampa, one of Italy's oldest and most respected newspapers. In it, physicist and writer Gabriella Greison discusses her latest book dedicated entirely to de Broglie — La lunghezza d'onda della felicità. The interview was conducted by journalist Francesca Pellas.
Greison is one of those rare people who can hold a physics degree and a theater stage with equal ease. She's spent years bringing the giants of 20th-century physics to life — on stage, in novels, in essays. In this book, she argues that de Broglie's formula λ = h/p is almost like a master key for thinking about the world: the slower you go, the more you expand. The more you stop trying to be compact, the wider your wave becomes.
That's not mysticism. It's physics used as metaphor — and Greison is careful to keep it grounded. As she told La Stampa: "If matter itself isn't compact, why should we be?" It's a legitimate question about rigidity — of identity, of certainty, of the way we meet the world.
"If matter itself isn't compact, why should we be? Let the clear separations go." — Gabriella Greison, paraphrased from her interview in La Stampa
What Does This Mean for You?
We know what you might be thinking. "This is beautiful, but what does wave-particle duality have to do with my actual life?"
Fair question. Let's be honest: it won't fix your Wi-Fi or make your morning commute shorter. But ideas change how we think — and how we think changes how we act.
The old story — that you are a fixed, isolated thing, defined by sharp edges and permanent properties — is not just philosophically questionable. It's emotionally exhausting. It makes loneliness feel like a default setting. It makes change feel like a threat.
The quantum story is different. You are a pattern of relationships. You exist in context. Your identity isn't a marble, unchanging and indifferent. It's more like a wave — shaped by what it encounters, carrying memory of past interactions, capable of interference and resonance with others.
Greison puts it beautifully in her La Stampa interview: "The people who have most shifted my trajectory, a word spoken at the right moment, someone who listened to me and welcomed me even in crisis — physics has taught me that nothing is isolated. Not even an electron."
Every Wave Leaves a Mark
Let's pull the threads together. Louis de Broglie, a French aristocrat with a taste for big questions, proposed in 1924 that all matter has a wave nature — and earned a Nobel Prize in 1929 when experiments confirmed it. His equation, λ = h/p, is one of the most elegant statements in physics: momentum and wavelength are inversely linked, bridging the world of particles and the world of waves.
Grete Hermann, working a decade later with equal rigor and far less recognition, showed that quantum mechanics doesn't destroy causality — it reframes it around relationships and context, not around isolated objects with fixed properties. She was a century ahead of the conversation.
And Gabriella Greison, writing in Milan in 2026, uses all of this to ask a question that deserves more airtime: if the universe is built from relationships, not things, what does that mean for how we live, how we connect, and how we hold our own identity?
At FreeAstroScience, we think it means this: you are not alone in the cosmos. You're entangled with it — literally, at the particle level, and metaphorically at every other level too. The universe didn't produce you and then step back. You are the universe continuing to happen.
Come back to FreeAstroScience.com whenever you want to keep that conversation going. We'll be here — asking questions, refusing easy answers, and making sure that reason stays wide awake.
Sources
- Matter is Not Made Up of Things — editorial text, FreeAstroScience source material (2026)
- Gabriella Greison, interview by Francesca Pellas, La Stampa (February 2026) — La lunghezza d'onda della felicità, Mondadori, 336 pp., €19.50
- Louis de Broglie — Wikipedia
- De Broglie Hypothesis — Purdue University Chemistry
- Wave–Particle Duality — EBSCO Research Starters
- Grete Hermann: quantum physicist who challenged Heisenberg and von Neumann — Physics World
- Grete Hermann: An Early Contributor to Quantum Theory — European Women in Mathematics (PDF)
- Grete Hermann's Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics — Oxford Academic