Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Table
2.5
also includes the dichotomies (or dualities) between the
global
and the
local
, the
forest
and
trees
,
whole
and
parts
,or
holism
and
reductionism
. These
dualities may reflect the same human cognitive limitations as exemplified by our
inability to see both the forest and trees at the same time. Thus, we may refer to
these dichotomies as the “forest-tree complementarity (FTC)” for convenience.
The simple notion of FTC may help resolve the controversies arising between
molecular neurobiologists (reductionism) and behavioral biologists (holism), just
as the wave-particle complementarity helped settle the controversy between
Einstein and his followers who believed in the primacy of particles over waves
and Bohr and his school believing the opposite, namely, the primacy of waves over
particle, in the early decades of the twentieth century.
The philosophical framework
erected on the basis of the assumption that the complementarity principle of Bohr
(generalized as the information-energy complementarity or the gnergy principle)
applies to all self-organizing processes in the Universe has been named
“complementarism” in the early 1990s
(Ji 1993, 1995), independently of Pais
(1991) who coined the same term to represent Bohr's assertion that his comple-
mentarity concept can be extended to fields beyond physics.
2.3.5 Two Kinds of Complementarities: Kinematics
vs. Dynamics and Wave vs. Particle
Kinematics
refers to the study of the
space
and
time
(or spacetime in the relativistic
frame of reference, where objects move with speeds close to that of light) coordina-
roles of the
energy
and the
momentum (or momenergy
in the relativistic frame of
reference) (Wheeler 1990, pp. 110-121) underlying the motions of objects. Bohr
referred to the
kinematic
relation as “space-time coordination” and the
dynamic
relation as “causality.” The wave-particle complementarity which is more widely
known than the kinematics-dynamics complementarity is “logically independent
notion” according to Murdoch (1987, p. 67). It is interesting to note that Heisenberg
had a different interpretation of Bohr's concept of the kinematics-dynamics com-
plementarity (Camillieri 2007). The
wave-particle
and
kinematics-dynamics
complementarities are compared in Table
2.8
.
The concepts of wave and particle are distinct, clearly separable, and logically
compatible in classical mechanics but become inseparable, fused, or “logically
incompatible” in quantum mechanics in the sense that they together, rather than
separately, describe quantum objects or quons. In other words, the classical
concepts of wave and particle cannot be applied to quons as they can be to classical
objects. Murdoch (1987, p. 80) also states that:
