Briefly on Bohr and complementarity.
My understanding is that complementarity was proposed following the EPR publication, It can be stated as : that a single quantum can exhibit a particle-like \emph{or} a wave-like behavior, but never both at the same time.
That does seem like quite a " bold " assertion, but was widely, almost unanimously , agreed to by the scientific community of that time, and still widely supported today.
Whether a quantum is clearly defined or not, it's somewhat safe to say that this represents a duality in thinking about the physical world, which I kind of believe was significantly addressed by David Bohm in the 1990's and his book : The Undivided Universe.
Nevertheless, we see this kind of assertion made about a variety of subjects in our social, economic, and political arenas, with bold assertions about something can be either - of one particular nature or the other.
Of course, if one follows this stuff, it is difficult to avoid the issue of the " collapse " of the wave equation, as relates to distinctive change of state in a system.
At any rate, I do suspect that these concepts apply in many other areas of scientific thought, and would also probably connect back even to phycology.
Comments
Post a Comment