General complementarity and the double-prism experiment
Lars Löfgren
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.
•Jan 1, 1994•7 citations