Louis De Broglie, a young doctoral student at the Sorbonne in Paris, proposed, in a doctoral thesis of just three pages, that it should be possible to observe diffraction and interference in the wave motion of free electrons, just as they can be observed in light. The professors were ready to reject the student due to the paucity and absurdity of the thesis, until someone took the trouble to ask Albert Einstein for his opinion. Einstein replied that the student did not deserve a doctorate but rather the Nobel Prize (which he actually received five years later, in 1929).
