Okay, so these quantum ideas work. So they are developed from tahe concept that matter is wave-like in its behaviour. But is this just a mathematical trick, or is matter really waves?? It didn't take long for this question to be answered.
In 1927, C.J. Davisson and his research associate, L.H. Germer, had a fortuitous accident in their vacuum system, which inadvertently gave them an ultra clean surface to their crystal sample of nickel. When they scattered a beam of high energy electrons from that surface, they measured a distribution of reflected electrons that suggested that they were being diffracted from the array of atoms on the surface. Davisson shared the 1937 Nobel Prize for this work with another scientist, G.P. Thompson.