General complementarity and the double-prism experiment

Lars Löfgren

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Abstract

The interesting double-prism experiment of Ghose, Home, and Agarwal 5)
has been suggested 5, 8, 16, 7, 6) as a challenge to Bohr´s views of complementarity. With the linguistic complementarity 14) as a general notion of complementarity, we analyze Bohr´s views of complementarity. We find that a careful formulation of Bohr´s wave-particle complementarity, with an explicit characterization of measurability as a particular low-level kind of quantum theoretical inferribility, is in fact not confronted by the double-prism experiment. Much less is the outcome a challenge to Bohr´s primary
view of complementarity, namely as a tension between definability and observability in a quantum mechanical observation language.
This primary view of Bohr, which is visible already in his Como paper 1), is a
general formulation of quantum mechanical complementarity. Although it connects
well to the subsequent metamathematical development of the wider linguistic complementarity, as a tension between describability and interpretability in a language, it is today surprisingly seldom referred to in quantum mechanical texts. Rather, discussions of the role of complementarity for the interpretability problem for quantum theory tend to focus on Bohr´s view of complementarity in terms of phenomena, which he conceived in his later discussions with Einstein (and which appears less clear than
Bohr´s primary view of complementarity).
The hierarchical structuring of quantum theory which is suggested in our analysis of the double-prism experiment, and in the analysis of complementarity in terms of phenomena, is of interest also for the general interpretability problem for quantum theory, and for questions about a quantum mechanical reality.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationSymposium on the foundations of modern physics 1994
EditorsK. V. Laurikainen, C. Montonen, K. Sunnarborg
Pages154-156
Publication statusPublished - 1994

Subject classification (UKÄ)

  • Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering

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