Physicists were perplexed in Bohr's day about why atoms didn't decay. Why doesn't an electron orbiting a nucleus spiral into the nucleus? Bohr postulated that electrons have fixed orbital patterns of fixed radii. In other words, the angular momentum of the electrons was quantized. It was either an entire this or an entire that but nothing else.

This idea intrigued a very brilliant prince of the French royal family named Louis de Broglie (pronounced "de Broy"). In the 1920s, he was plucking a guitar and watching the strings vibrate. As a note died away, he realized that the note remains constant. Plucking an open A remained an A until the string ceased to vibrate. It didn't start to decrease in pitch as the string slowed down. Now why was that? Prince Louis realized that the string was confined--or stationary--and unable to propagate through space and so its frequency or vibratory rate was fixed.

Hence a discrete frequency spectrum can be determined for the stationary vibrations of the guitar string. The lowest frequency would determine the pitch. The higher frequencies would represent the harmonics. Every sound has a fundamental vibration and overtones (or harmonics). These harmonics are amplified differently and therefore determine the timbre (or aural characteristics) of the sound. Suppose, thought de Broglie, that electrons orbiting around the atom do the same thing. Each has its lowest energy state, which is stationary, and its higher orbits for its excited states, which are also stationary. These, in turn, determine the atom's identity. The lowest orbital, n=1, is the standing wave. At n=2, the wave must have twice the circumference of n=1 and n=3 must have three the circumference and so on. These are discrete states and cannot change so an electron can't start to spiral into the nucleus because that would involve occupying orbitals on non-discrete states and these do not and cannot exist.

The philosophical implications are stunning: the identity of an atom is simply the function of patterns of its confined waves. Nothing in the environment affects this pattern. Because of that, this standing pattern has no past, no memory. The wave pattern is dependent on its existence solely by the conditions of its confinement and does not interact with its environment. The pattern is simply regenerating itself over and over and over again each instant. In other words, there isn't a wave pattern persisting from A to B but the wave pattern at A ceases to exist and is instantly replaced by a new but identical pattern at B that, ironically, has no connection to the pattern that existed at A. At a future Point C, the wave pattern at B will instantly cease and be replaced by a new, identical wave pattern. There is a discontinuity in the pattern that separates it from the environment and from its past. It is simply being regenerated or rebuilt every instant. No matter where in the universe that atom is, its wave pattern will be the same—the environment will have no effect on it.

In other words--matter is waves. Prior to de Broglie, physicists thought only light exhibited the wave-particle duality. De Broglie proved all matter does. After all, once we stop thinking of an electron as a particle zipping around a nucleus, we realize it is actually a wave with a specific circumference and that circumference absolutely MUST contain the whole wave exactly or two whole waves exactly or three. You can't have 0.5 of a wave or 3/7 of a wave. You have either the exactly the entire wave or you have none. The orbitals can only have certain sizes or wavelengths depending up the angular momentum of the electron.

So at any orbital, the electron isn't actually moving as a particle would but rather it is a standing wave. If if drops to a lower level, its wavelength gets longer but the frequency decreases and hence has less energy. So where does the energy go that it just had at the higher orbital? It's released from the atom as a photon. That's why radio waves, infra-red, visible light, UV radiation and gamma rays are all the same thing.

Louis de Broglie submitted this idea as a Ph.D. thesis and was awarded a Nobel Prize for it in 1929--the first time anyone had ever received a Nobel Prize for a Ph.D. thesis.

De Broglie's idea was experimentally proven by Davisson and Germer whose diffraction experiments with electrons produced the same patterns as X-rays and led to the formulation of a wave equation by Austrian physicist Erwin Schroedinger that describes all matter and gave birth to quantum mechanics, which is beautiful stuff.

So the material universe isn't material at all, it's just wave packets of energy flashing and having flashed are then gone and instantly replaced by a "new" wave packet that is identical to the preceding one but not really connected to it and is not affected by anything external.

Since consciousness is not extinguished by death (or you could not be conscious now), you must remember all your experiences and re-live all your sensations. This is where our perception of an external world comes from and it will continue on for "eternity" (it has an end but repeats like a phonograph record on a turntable that keeps returning to the beginning and playing to the end over and over). These experiences and sensations also cause the illusion of a "self." We all see the same world through "consensus" because consciousness is unitary. But because we are ignorant, blind, we can't see things as they truly and mistake this created world as absolute and that there is nothing else.

The true consciousness is "upstream" of us and therefore unknowable. We live in duality--they are the poles of the battery that fuels this perception of a world (and remember, physics already accepts experimentally that matter is both particle and wave). But this undifferentiated consciousness is not dual so perceiver and perceived are joined but we cannot know this superposition. Only when it differentiates into these two states can we comprehend it at all.

There is really nothing to experience and no one to experience it. It is an illusion--a dream--of undifferentiated consciousness trying to grasp its own nature. It's like a fingertip trying to touch itself. It can't but since it is all there is, it must "delude" itself into being both a toucher and the touchee. Hence it dreams us.