Complementarity and our Knowledge of Nature

Arun Bala

Menas C. Kafatos, Robert L. Nadeau

Arkady Plotnitsky

Вячеслав Георгиевич Мушич-громыко

In some cases with quantum experiments, some features of the objects disappear. These features we define as a pair of conjugate and complementarity quantities. Such results are not a rarity in quantum studies and this fact makes it possible to use the princi ple of complementarity in various fields of other natural sciences and some applied areas of knowledge (concerning classical objects of knowledge). The author solves this problem by discovering a certain methodology that would be similar to the principle of complementarity but applicable to the objects in cultural and humanitarian sphere as well.

Simon Saunders

Shahriar S. Afshar

Bohr's principle of complementarity predicts that in a welcher weg ("which-way") experiment, obtaining fully visible interference pattern should lead to the destruction of the path knowledge. Here I report a failure for this prediction in an optical interferometry experiment. Coherent laser light is passed through a dual pinhole and allowed to go through a converging lens, which forms well-resolved images of the respective pinholes, providing complete path knowledge. A series of thin wires are then placed at previously measured positions corresponding to the dark fringes of the interference pattern upstream of the lens. No reduction in the resolution and total radiant flux of either image is found in direct disagreement with the predictions of the principle of complementarity. In this paper, a critique of the current measurement theory is offered, and a novel nonperturbative technique for ensemble properties is introduced. Also, another version of this experiment without an imaging lens is suggested, and some of the implications of the violation of complementarity for another suggested experiment to investigate the nature of the photon and its "empty wave" is briefly discussed.