From: Damien Broderick (thespike@earthlink.net)
Date: Thu Jan 09 2003 - 00:09:14 MST
Hubert Mania:
> There was a period in Niels Bohr's life when he was fond of the Chinese
> yin-yang-philosophy
More specifically, his wife was. Hence the Bohr coat of arms (illustrated
http://www.upscale.utoronto.ca/GeneralInterest/Harrison/Complementarity/Comp
Copen.html ).
> the philosophy of opposites that don't contradict but are
> equally matched like black and white, day and night, cold and hot, etc.
More exactly, aspects of the world that exceed our limited apertures to it,
so that it seemed to Bohr equally true that the world is fundamentally
punctate (made of particles) and simultaneously undulatory (composed of
continuous waves), even though at the meso-scale these are strictly
alternatives. Complementarity has been pushed kicking and screaming by New
Agers and some deconstructors (e.g. Complementarity: Anti-Epistemology After
Bohr and Derrida, by Arkady Plotnitsky) far beyond the pragmatic limits Bohr
set (IMO).
Damien Broderick
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