Complementarity Principle

Historical Context Note

Robert Clark (The Literary Encyclopedia)

The Literary Encyclopedia. WORLD HISTORY AND IDEAS: A CROSS-CULTURAL VOLUME.

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Physics

Dates

Date of occurrence 1928

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Denmark (Location)

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The importance of the complementarity principle for literary and cultural studies is that its announcement, along with Einstein’s “Theory of Relativity”, marks the shift from an essentially Newtonian world-view to a relativistic world-view. it was propounded by Niels Bohr as a way of resolving the fact that if light or electro-magnetic phenomena are assumed to be wave forms we can derive some reliable understanding of them; and if they are treated as streams of particles (electrons or photons) we can derive other kinds of reliable knowledge of them. Rather than one set of data being right and the other wrong, Bohr realised that both kinds of knowledge are true and that to arrive at full knowledge of matter and energy one needs to apply both theories. Furthermore, at the sub-atomic…

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365 words

Citation: Clark, Robert. "Complementarity Principle". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 28 October 2000 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=210, accessed 23 November 2024.]

Complementarity Principle

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