Abstract
When Heisenberg said of wave-particle dualism that it was as if a box were “full and empty at the same time,” he chose this Zen-like analogy not only because this strange dualism defies the normative Western sense of logical relationships; he was also suggesting that the allegedly “full” description of this reality in physical theory, wave mechanics, was “empty” in the sense that only the wave or particle aspect can be revealed in single acts of observation. Both aspects are never present in a single measurement, and the aspect that is apparent is a function of experimental choice. The new logic that describes this situation, developed by Niels Bohr, is known as the “logical framework of complementarity.”
The paradox is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality ought to be.
Richard Feynman
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Reference
Eugene P. Wigner, “The Problem of Measurement,“ in Quantum Theory and Measurement, ed. John A. Wheeler and Wojciech H. Zurek (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983 ), p. 327.
Ibid, p. 327.
Olivier C. de Beauregard, private communication (1988).
Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law( Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1967 ), p. 130.
John A. Wheeler, “Beyond the Black Hole,” in Some Strangeness in the Proportion, ed. Harry Woolf ( London: Addison-Wesley, 1980 ), p. 354.
See Abner Shimony, “The Reality of the Quantum World,” Scientific American, January, 1988, p. 46.
Richard P. Feynman, QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter( Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985 ), p. 7.
Ibid, p. 25.
See Paul C.W. Davies, Quantum Mechanics ( London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984 ).
Richard P. Feynman, The Character of Physical Law, p. 80ff.
Abner Shimony, “The Reality of the Quantum World,” p. 48.
Steven Weinberg, quoted in Heinz Pagels, The Cosmic Code( New York: Bantam Books, 1983 ), p. 239.
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Kafatos, M., Nadeau, R. (2000). The Strange New World of the Quantum: Wave-Particle Dualism. In: The Conscious Universe. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-1308-6_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-1308-6_3
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