As we continue to celebrate 100 years of Quantum Physics, this is a fun account of the famous Davisson-Germer experiment that was the first to demonstrate the wave-like nature of electrons.
It's interesting that, at the end of the article, it was pointed out that this experiment did not originally was set out to seek the experimental evidence for the wave-like nature of electrons. They were intended to do something else, and then learned about something, and adapted it later. This is not really that unusual. The first thing that popped into my head was the discovery of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) by Wilson and Penzias. They certainly were not looking for the CMB with their microwave antenna. It was a serendipitous discovery. In fact, one can even say that the discovery of superconductivity also came out of an experiment that was not designed to look for it, because no one knew at that time that such a thing could exist.
One could say that this is another one of those "Who Ordered That" scenario.
Zz.
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