Complementarity before uncertainty
type: Item
instance of: scholarly article
title: Complementarity before uncertainty
zbMATH Open document ID: 1244.01012
author: Sandro Petruccioli
published in: Archive for History of Exact Sciences
publication date: 2012-03-08T00:00:00Z
review text: In his article Petruccioli gives a detailed argument that a part of Bohr's manuscript mss26 dated to the summer 1927 by the editors of Bohr's ``Collected Works'' was written earlier. Petruccioli bases his statement on an analysis of the manuscript's context and on some formal remarks. He starts his presentation with a detailed description of the context of the manuscript, that means the topics, the exciting developments in quantum mechanics as well as the lively discussions that are connected with the manuscript and the endeavours to get a consistent physical interpretation resolving the contradictions of the continuity/discontinuity as well as wave/particle dualism. Therefore he inspects the quarrel of the physicists about the foundation of quantum mechanics by matrix mechanics and the wave theory, two formally equivalent theories but conveying two quite different pictures of reality. He then shows in detail that the experiments of C. Davisson and L. H. Germer and their interpretation as an experimental confirmation of de Broglie's wave hypothesis was known to the Göttingen physicists in Summer 1925. One year later, leading physicists among them Bohr, Born and Franck discussed the experiments with Davisson at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. For these reasons Petruccioli regards the basis for dating Bohr's manuscript mentioned above as demolished and re-dated one of the manuscripts one year earlier, between the Bohr-Kramers-Slater-theory (1924) and the 1927 drafts of complementarity. As a consequence he concludes that the re-dating changes ``the interpretative perspective making it possible to achieve the historically correct reconstruction''. The assumption that complementarity was Bohr's response to Heisenberg is therefore an error. Re-dating the document, ``everything falls neatly into place''.
reviewed by: Karl Heinz Schlote
Mathematics Subject Classification ID: 01A60
Mathematics Subject Classification ID: 81-03
zbMATH DE Number: 6012906
zbMATH Keywords: N. Bohr
zbMATH Keywords: W. Heisenberg
zbMATH Keywords: uncertainty principle
zbMATH Keywords: complementarity
zbMATH Keywords: quantum mechanics
MaRDI profile type: Publication
full work available at URL: s00407-011-0087-0
OpenAlex ID: W2062510016
cites work: Q4940743
cites work: Q5570905
DOI: 10.1007/S00407-011-0087-0
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description: scientific article; zbMATH DE number 6012906