Complementarity before uncertainty

Archive for History of Exact Sciences 65 (6):591-624 (2011)
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Abstract

This article argues that a manuscript dated to the summer of 1927 by the editors of Bohr’s Collected Works was written a year earlier. The re-dating allows the conclusion that Bohr was well on his way to complementarity before his famous fight with Heisenberg over the uncertainty principle early in 1927. The literature that assumes that complementarity was Bohr’s response to Heisenberg is therefore in error. The editors of the Collected Works assigned the document the date of 1927 because it refers to electron-diffraction experiments by Davisson and Germer, which were published in 1927. But as the article points out, Bohr and other leading physicists such as Max Born met Davisson in Britain in 1926 and discussed the experiments with him then. That demolished the basis of the earlier dating. Finally, the article argues that when the document takes its place between the Bohr–Kramers–Slater theory (1924) and the 1927 drafts of complementarity, everything falls neatly into place.

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Citations of this work

Correspondence principle versus Planck-type theory of the atom.Sandro Petruccioli - 2014 - Archive for History of Exact Sciences 68 (5):599-639.

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References found in this work

Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes.Imre Lakatos - 1970 - In Imre Lakatos & Alan Musgrave (eds.), Criticism and the growth of knowledge. Cambridge [Eng.]: Cambridge University Press. pp. 91-196.
Quantum Dialogue: The Making of a Revolution.Mara Beller - 1999 - University of Chicago Press.
Criticism and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes.Imre Lakatos - 1969 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 69 (1):149 - 186.
Atoms, Metaphors and Paradoxes: Niels Bohr and the Construction of a New Physics.Sandro Petruccioli - 1995 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 46 (2):275-279.

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