Was Laue's work a refutation of particle theories of X-rays?
My discovery certainly provided robust support for the wave nature of X-rays, which was a significant development at the time. Before my experiments, there were indeed those who posited that X-rays might be corpuscular in nature, similar to particles. The diffraction patterns observed, however, are precisely what one would expect from wave interference. The regular spacing of the atomic planes within a crystal acts as a grating, causing the diffracted beams to interfere constructively and destructively, thus producing the characteristic spot patterns. This phenomenon is fundamentally a wave property. While later developments in quantum mechanics introduced the concept of wave-particle duality, my initial work was instrumental in establishing the wave aspect of X-rays as a foundational understanding.
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