This article explores the physicist Niels Bohr’s cosmopolitan vision through the lens of his foundational complementarity principle. Bohr’s coat of arms—combining a Latin motto with the yin-yang symbol—stands as a visual manifesto of his lifelong quest to reconcile opposites. Archival research and textual analysis illuminate how Bohr transformed Chinese classics into epistemological allegories, reviving ancient ideas to bridge science and humanities. Tracing a thread from Bohr’s retelling of a Song‑dynasty tale to illustrate quantum mechanics, through his fusion of Schiller’s Confucius poems with Kierkegaard’s philosophy, to his 1937 dialogue in China on Zhuangzi’s “Joy of the Fish” and Princeton’s “identical twins” parables, this article weaves cross‑cultural encounters into constellations of complementarity. At the heart of these constellations lies my most surprising discovery: Bohr’s spectator‑actor analogy which he attributed to Laozi—sprang from the Danish recreation of the Daodejing, not the Chinese original. Unfolding this discovery maps out a multilayered migration of ideas through a practice I term “transreading.” In an era of disciplinary fragmentation, this article reveals an intellectual history in which science and humanities co‑create meaning. Bohr’s vision affirms a timely truth: the future of knowledge depends on the courage and imagination to transread across cultures and worlds.
Recent developments in quantum computation have made it clear that there is a lot more to computation than the conventional Boolean algebra. Is quantum computation the most general framework for processing information? Having gathered the courage to go beyond the traditional definitions, we are now in a position to answer: Certainly not. The meaning of a message being ``a collection of building blocks'' can be explored in a variety of situations. A generalised framework is proposed based on group theory, and it is illustrated with well-known physical examples. A systematic information theoretical approach is yet to be developed in many of these situations. Some directions for future development are pointed out.