Interpretation Of Complementarity Research Articles

Einstein’s Local Realism vs. Bohr’s Instrumental Anti-Realism: The Debate Between Two Titans in the Quantum Theory Arena

The objective of this article is to demonstrate how the historical debate between materialism and idealism, in the field of Philosophy, extends, in new clothes, to the field of Quantum Physics characterized by realism and anti-realism. For this, we opted for a debate, also historical, between the realism of Albert Einstein, for whom reality exists regardless of the existence of the knowing subject, and Niels Bohr, for whom we do not have access to the ultimate reality of the matter, unless conditioning it to the existence of an observer endowed with rationality, position adopted in the Interpretation of Complementarity (1927) – posture that was expanded in 1935 when Bohr assumed a “relationalist” conception, according to which the quantum state is defined by the relationship between the quantum object and the entire measuring device. This is an extremely important debate, as it further consolidates the results of nascent Quantum Mechanics, guaranteeing Bohr the leadership of the orthodoxy based on the interpretation of complementarity. Here, when dealing with Quantum Theory, we will not make any distinction between the terms Quantum Physics, Quantum Theory or Quantum Mechanics. The entire discussion will be held under the name “Quantum Theory”. Theory that tries to analyze and describe the behavior of physical systems of reduced dimensions, close to the sizes of molecules, atoms and subatomic particles. We hope that the reader will appreciate the genius of these two titans in this field of Physics when they magnificently formulate the arguments that support the object of their defenses.

Einstein’s Local Realism vs. Bohr’s Instrumental Anti-Realism: The Debate Between Two Titans in the Quantum Theory Arena

The objective of this article is to demonstrate how the historical debate between materialism and idealism, in the field of Philosophy, extends, in new clothes, to the field of Quantum Physics characterized by realism and anti-realism. For this, we opted for a debate, also historical, between the realism of Albert Einstein, for whom reality exists regardless of the existence of the knowing subject, and Niels Bohr, for whom we do not have access to the ultimate reality of the matter, unless conditioning it to the existence of an observer endowed with rationality, position adopted in the Interpretation of Complementarity (1927) – posture that was expanded in 1935 when Bohr assumed a “relationalist” conception, according to which the quantum state is defined by the relationship between the quantum object and the entire measuring device. This is an extremely important debate, as it further consolidates the results of nascent Quantum Mechanics, guaranteeing Bohr the leadership of the orthodoxy based on the interpretation of complementarity. Here, when dealing with Quantum Theory, we will not make any distinction between the terms Quantum Physics, Quantum Theory or Quantum Mechanics. The entire discussion will be held under the name “Quantum Theory”. Theory that tries to analyze and describe the behavior of physical systems of reduced dimensions, close to the sizes of molecules, atoms and subatomic particles. We hope that the reader will appreciate the genius of these two titans in this field of Physics when they magnificently formulate the arguments that support the object of their defenses.

Women’s Place in the Andes: Engaging Decolonial Feminist Anthropology by Florence E. Babb

Reviewed by: Women’s Place in the Andes: Engaging Decolonial Feminist Anthropology by Florence E. Babb Susan C. Bourque Florence E. Babb, Women’s Place in the Andes: Engaging Decolonial Feminist Anthropology. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. 277 pp. For those who wish to understand the recent intellectual history of the study of Peruvian Andean women, Florence Babb’s remarkable book will be essential. In Women’s Place in the Andes, Babb provides us with an extensive review of the last half-century of anthropological thinking, theorizing, and debate regarding gender relations and the roles of women in rural Andean Peru. The author has done extensive fieldwork in Peru (as well as Nicaragua and Mexico) and has engaged over the past 40 years with Peruvian and Latin American, US, and European scholars, feminists, market women, and campesinas. She gives us a perceptive account of her own involvement with the significant theoretical and political questions with which scholars have struggled, such as the differential impact of modernization efforts on women and men, and complementarity versus subordination in Andean sex roles. She revisits and revises previously held ideas through a re-examination of her work with the perspective of a mature and confident scholar, eager to understand what combination of theoretical lenses is most useful for understanding Andean women’s lives. As Babb notes, she has been engaged in rethinking her own work in light of the research and debates among Peruvian scholars and feminists and in light of the political and economic changes that have occurred in Peru over this tumultuous half century. The book begins with a reconsideration of a paper Babb wrote as a graduate student on the impact of development efforts on gender relations. Babb was one of a small group of scholars who argued that well-intentioned efforts at “development” and “modernization” did not have the same outcomes for women as they did for men. Access to new tools [End Page 1297] and technology often gave preference to men and this subsequently undermined the previous distribution of roles and power between men and women. This position was a significant challenge to the dominant theories of modernization in the late 1950s and 1960s and was often dismissed. In contrast, Babb assigned agency to the women who resisted development efforts that undermined their sources of control. Her respect for the subjects of her research and her effort to understand the constraints under which their choices were made are found throughout the trajectory of Babb’s work. Subsequent chapters trace her extensive fieldwork among the market women of Huaraz and the communities of the Callejon de Huaylas in central Andean Peru. This long association with Peru gives Babb a rich basis for reflection. She notes the degree to which questions of what constitutes “lo andino” and the issue of “complementarity” versus subordination—questions that sparked scholarly debate in the late 1970s—remain key parts of today’s conversations about Andean women’s status. These core debates center on how Andean women view themselves, their contributions to their communities, their roles in the family and the economy, and not insignificantly, the attitudes of others (primarily urban mestizos) toward them. Babb traces these changes through the discourse and debates at the international meetings of feminists and activists. This includes Latin American feminist meetings held in Lima, UN women’s meetings in Mexico, and lectures at regional and national universities. She was frequently on the program as a researcher or a discussant, and recalls in detail the challenging exchanges that led to revisions in her interpretations. Her review of what were often contentious encounters provides an anthropologist’s insight into how intellectual growth, insight, and change occur. This alone is a valuable contribution to the intellectual history of feminist scholarship in Latin America. Babb’s respect for the contributions of others to her own intellectual development is evident throughout the recounting of her scholarly journey. She relates her conversations with Maruja Barrig, the brilliant Peruvian scholar and activist, who challenged Babb’s interpretation of complementarity in Babb’s early work on Vicos. Babb describes how Barrig clarified the negative impact of notions of “complementarity” on the work of NGOs attempting to...

The Commission as a Party before the Court – Reflections on the Complementarity Arrangement

The African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights has worked as the continent's watchdog, under the ACHPR, for almost 30 years. Much has changed since the time of its inception. More institutions, set to ensure the implementation of the ACHPR, have been added. As the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights became operational, a two-tiered human rights system was created.This article explores the inter-relationship between the ACHPR, the Protocol Establishing the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights and the Procedural Rules of these two institutions within the specific context of the African Commission's mandate to refer communications to the African Court. The aim is to offer a purposeful interpretation of the Procedural Rules governing referrals, guided by the understanding of the principle of complementarity in the preparatory works. The author argues that an appropriate interpretation of complementarity, within the context of referrals, becomes vital in alleviating one of the long-term plagues of the African, protective, human rights system, namely the lack of resources and human capital. It is suggested that the African Commission and the African Court can only be effective if they take proper cognisance of the principle of complementarity, in referring and receiving communications.

Antropo-logika komplementarnej nierozłączności problematyki „dasein człowieka” z problematyką „autoprzekazu Boga”

The issues of the article bring together, inspired by Heidegger's hermeneutical interpretation of complementarity, problematic aspects of human Dasein with issues of God's auto-transference. Interest in this complementarity is at its core an interest in the possibility of cognition and realisation of human identity. The article's analysis is divided into two fundamental parts: introduction and development. The first part introduces in a synthetic way problems of anthropological inseparableness of the relation “Dasein of human–God's auto-transference”. The second part develops an interpretation of the historical process of that relation (Dasein–Sein; Dasein–Nihilism) revealed through the auto-transference explanation of human identity. The essence of the historical genesis of human identity is Christological unification of people according to the pattern of the Trinitarian Community of Love. In that light, the creative-salvative process of anthropogenesis can be identified with a process of ecclesiogenesis. This should be acknowledged in the definition of contemporary globalisation.

When are signals complements or substitutes?

The paper introduces a notion of complementarity (substitutability) of two signals which requires that in all decision problems each signal becomes more (less) valuable when the other signal becomes available. We provide a general characterization which relates complementarity and substitutability to a Blackwell comparison of two auxiliary signals. In a setting with a binary state space and binary signals, we find an explicit characterization that permits an intuitive interpretation of complementarity and substitutability. We demonstrate how these conditions extend to more general settings. We also illustrate the implications of our concepts for three economic applications: information disclosure in auctions, information aggregation through voting, and polarization of beliefs.

Quantum Humor: The Playful Side of Physics at Bohr’s Institute for Theoretical Physics

From the 1930s to the 1950s, a period of pivotal developments in quantum, nuclear, and particle physics, physicists at Niels Bohr’s Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen took time off from their research to write humorous articles, letters, and other works. Best known is the Blegdamsvej Faust, performed in April 1932 at the close of one of the Institute’s annual conferences. I also focus on the Journal of Jocular Physics, a humorous tribute to Bohr published on the occasions of his 50th, 60th, and 70th birthdays in 1935, 1945, and 1955. Contributors included Leon Rosenfeld, Victor Weisskopf, George Gamow, Oskar Klein, and Hendrik Casimir. I examine their contributions along with letters and other writings to show that they offer a window into some issues in physics at the time, such as the interpretation of complementarity and the nature of the neutrino, as well as the politics of the period.

The Kantian framework of complementarity

A growing number of commentators have, in recent years, noted the important affinities in the views of Immanuel Kant and Niels Bohr. While these commentators are correct, the picture they present of the connections between Bohr and Kant is painted in broad strokes; it is open to the criticism that these affinities are merely superficial. In this essay, I provide a closer, structural, analysis of both Bohr's and Kant's views that makes these connections more explicit. In particular, I demonstrate the similarities between Bohr's argument, on the one hand, that neither the wave nor the particle description of atomic phenomena pick out an object in the ordinary sense of the word, and Kant's requirement, on the other hand, that both ‘mathematical’ (having to do with magnitude) and ‘dynamical’ (having to do with an object's interaction with other objects) principles must be applicable to appearances in order for us to determine them as objects of experience. I argue that Bohr's ‘complementarity interpretation’ of quantum mechanics, which views atomic objects as idealizations, and which licenses the repeal of the principle of causality for the domain of atomic physics, is perfectly compatible with, and indeed follows naturally from a broadly Kantian epistemological framework.

The Central Mystery of Quantum Mechanics

A critical re-examination of the double-slit experiment and its variants is presented to clarify the nature of what Feynman called the “central mystery” and the “only mystery”of quantum mechanics, leading to an interpretation of complementarity in which and description rather than a wave or particle' description is valid for the same experimental set up, with the wave culminating in the particle sequentially in time. This interpretation is different from Bohr's but is consistent with the von Neumann formulation as well as some more recent interpretations of quantum mechanics.

Reflexive monism versus complementarism: An analysis and criticism of the conceptual groundwork of Max Velmans’s reflexive model of consciousness

From 1990 on, the London psychologist Max Velmans developed a novel approach to (phenomenal) consciousness according to which an experience of an object is phenomenologically identical to an object as experienced. On the face of it I agree; but unlike Velmans I argue that the latter should be understood as comparable, not to a Kantian, but rather to a noematic ‘phenomenon’ in the Husserlian sense. Consequently, I replace Velmans’s reflexive model with a complementaristic approach in a strict sense which leaves no room for either monistic or dualistic views (including Velmans’s ontological monism and his dual-aspect interpretation of complementarity) and hence requires us to radically reinterpret the concept of psychophysical causation.

Who Invented the “Copenhagen Interpretation”? A Study in Mythology

What is commonly known as the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, regarded as representing a unitary Copenhagen point of view, differs significantly from Bohr's complementarity interpretation, which does not employ wave packet collapse in its account of measurement and does not accord the subjective observer any privileged role in measurement. It is argued that the Copenhagen interpretation is an invention of the mid-1950s, for which Heisenberg is chiefly responsible, various other physicists and philosophers, including Bohm, Feyerabend, Hanson, and Popper, having further promoted the invention in the service of their own philosophical agendas.

A uniqueness theorem for ‘no collapse’ interpretations of quantum mechanics

We prove a uniqueness theorem showing that, subject to certain natural constraints, all ‘no collapse’ interpretations of quantum mechanics can be uniquely characterized and reduced to the choice of a particular preferred observable as determinate (definite, sharp). We show how certain versions of the modal interpretation, Bohm's ‘causal’ interpretation, Bohr's complementarity interpretation, and the orthodox (Dirac-von Neumann) interpretation without the projection postulate can be recovered from the theorem. Bohr's complementarity and Einstein's realism appear as two quite different proposals for selecting the preferred determinate observable—either settled pragmatically by what we choose to observe, or fixed once and for all, as the Einsteinian realist would require, in which case the preferred observable is a ‘beable’ in Bell's sense, as in Bohm's interpretation (where the preferred observable is position in configuration space).

The problem of properties in quantum mechanics

The properties of classical and quantum systems are characterized by different algebraic structures. We know that the properties of a quantum mechanical system form a partial Boolean algebra not embeddable into a Boolean algebra, and so cannot all be co-determinate. We also know that maximal Boolean subalgebras of properties can be (separately) co-determinate. Are there larger subsets of properties that can be co-determinate without contradiction? Following an analysis of Bohrs response to the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen objection to the complementarity interpretation of quantum mechanics, a principled argument is developed justifying the selection of particular subsets of properties as co-determinate for a quantum system in particular physical contexts. These subsets are generated by sets of maximal Boolean subalgebras, defined in each case by the relation between the quantum state and a measurement (possibly, but not necessarily, the measurement in terms of which we seek to establish whether or not a particular property of the system in question obtains). If we are required to interpret quantum mechanics in this way, then predication for quantum systems is quite unlike the corresponding notion for classical systems.

On Bohr's response to EPR: II

In my reconstruction of Bohr's reply to the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen argument, I pointed out that Bohr showed explicitly, within the framework of the complementarity interpretation, how a locally maximal measurement on a subsystem S2 of a composite system S1+S2, consisting of two spatially separated subsystems, can make determinate both a locally maximal Boolean subalgebra for S2 and a locally maximal Boolean subalgebra for S1. As it stands, this response is open to an objection. In this note, I show that meeting the objection requires a modification of the complementarity thesis concerning what propositions can be taken as determinate, or what observables can be raken to have values, in a given measurement context.

On Bohr's response to EPR: A quantum logical analysis

Bohr's complementarity interpretation is represented as the relativization of the quantum mechanical description of a system to the maximal Boolean subalgebra (in the non-Boolean logical structure of the system) selected by a classically described experimental arrangement. Only propositions in this subalgebra have determinate truth values. The concept of a minimal revision of a Boolean subalgebra by a measurement is defined, and it is shown that the nonmaximal measurement of spin on one subsystem in the spin version of the Einstein—Podolsky—Rosen experiment actually selects an appropriate maximal Boolean subalgebra ℛ′ in the logical structure of the composite system, via a minimal revision of the maximal Boolean subalgebra & associated with the preparation of the singlet spin state. This provides an explanation for the determinate truth values of propositions in ℛ′ referring to the second subsystem within the framework of the complementarity interpretation.

A comparison between realistic and orthodox interpretations of a possible experiment based on two recent tests of quantum mechanics

We discuss an ideal experiment from both the usual quantum mechanical and the realistic nonseparable plus pilot-wave standpoints. It is shown that whereas the latter allows for a consistent interpretation in agreement with the dual wave-particle nature of light, the former leads to inconsistencies. This seems to corroborate the point of view according to which quantum mechanics is an incomplete theory and to suggest that the complementarity interpretation must be revised. Although only the ideal case is being discussed, a practical realization of the experiment taking into account the actual experimental limitations seems to be possible since the necessary technology has already been employed in two other previous experiments.

Momentum conservation decides Heisenberg's interpretation of the uncertainty formulas

The present thesis considers, in the light of Heisenberg's interpretation of the uncertainty formulas, the conditions necessary for the derivation of the quantitative statement or law of momentum conservation. The result of such considerations is a contradiction between the formalism of quantum physics and the asserted consequences of Heisenberg's interpretation. This contradiction decides against Heisenberg's interpretation of the uncertainty formulas on upholding that the formalism of quantum physics is both consistent and complete, at least insofar as the statement of momentum conservation can be proved within this formalism. A few comments are also included on Bohr's “complementarity interpretation” of the formalism of quantum physics. A suggestion, based on a statistical mode of empirical testing of the “uncertainty” formulas, does not give rise to any such contradiction.