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To make it more accessible to readers unfamiliar with the language of quantum mechanics, the editors have appended to this article a glossary of selected terms.
In 1927, at a conference in honor of the pioneering studies in electricity by Alessandro Nicola Volta in his birthplace in Como, Italy, Niels Bohr formulated the principle of complementarity in what has become known as the Como lecture. This lecture was published in the proceedings of the Fifth "Conseil de Physique" Brussels, 24-29 October 1927 (Bohr 1928). Complementarity constituted one of the pillars of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. I shall attempt to analyze here its status and epistemological function, taking into account that, as Scheibe says, it is impossible to consider the Copenhagen interpretation as a unified and consistent logical structure (1973).
The complementarity principle considers as mutually exclusive attributes represented by noncommuting operators, as, for example, the position and the momentum of a particle. In spite of this, some physicists like Fock and Rosenfeld (see, for example, Freire 1998-Ed.), as well as philosophers, considered this principle to be a dialectical one. It is well known, however, that according to Heraclitus, Hegel, and the founders of modern materialism, dialectics means unity and struggle of opposites. Consequently, before passing to the analysis of the principle of complementarity, it would be useful to recall the conception of dialectics concerning opposite or contradictory attributes of matter.
According to Heraclitus (576-480 B.C.), there is a hidden harmony in nature and a unity of opposites, like that of the lyre and the bow. According to Hegel (1770-1831), creator of modern dialectics, modern science eliminated metaphysics. At the same time, the progress of empirical science favored the formation of more elevated categories. A central category of dialectics, according to Hegel also, is that of contradiction. Dialectics considers the opposites and the contradictory in their unity, and not as being mutually exclusive.
Things are contradictory: Formal logic, writes Hegel, considers the category of contradiction as less important than that of identity. Hegel, on the contrary, regards contradiction as the more profound and essential determination. It is the root of movement and the vital manifestation of things. Contradiction, in consequence, is not simply a logical or an epistemic category. It is an ontological category....