Niels Bohr's complementarity

Makoto Katsumori

Springer - Berlin

2011

This book explores the modern physicist Niels Bohr's philosophical thought, specifically his pivotal idea of complementarity, with a focus on the relation between the roles of what he metaphorically calls 'spectators' and "actors. " It seeks to spell out the structural and historical complexity of the idea of complementarity in terms of different modes of the 'spectator-actor" relation, showing, in particular, that the reorganization of Bohr's thought starting from his 1935 debate with Einstein and his collaborators is characterized by an extension of the dynamic conception of complementarity from non-physical contexts to the very field of quantum theory.