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| In Bohr's words, the wave and particle pictures, or the visual and causal representations, are "complementary" to each other. That is, they are mutually exclusive, yet jointly essential for a complete description of quantum events. Obviously in an experiment in the everyday world an object cannot be both a wave and a particle at the same time; it must be either one or the other, depending upon the situation. In later refinements of this interpretation the wave function of the unobserved object is a mixture of both the wave and particle pictures until the experimenter chooses what to observe in a given experiment. (Remember that, according to Heisenberg, the path of an object first comes into existence when we observe it.) By choosing either the wave or the particle picture, the experimenter disturbs untouched nature. Such favoritism unleashes a limitation in what one can learn about nature "as it really is." This limitation is expressed by Heisenberg's uncertainty relations, which, for Bohr, were related to what he was now calling "complementarity." Complementarity, uncertainty, and the statistical interpretation of Schrodinger's wave function were all related. Together they formed a logical interpretation of the physical meaning of quantum mechanics known as the "Copenhagen interpretation." link *** Complementarity and the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics link links |
