Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
entities, q, p, t and E. In contrast, many of the complementary pairs appearing in the
interior of Tables
2.9
and
2.11
are qualitative. Hence, it may be concluded that:
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is quantitative: Bohr's complementarity principle is
qualitative. (2.49)
If we can consider
quantity
and
quality
as complementary to each other in the
sense of Bohr and the Taoist philosophy, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle
(HUP) and Bohr's complementarity principle (BCP) would become complemen-
tary to each other, leading to the following statement:
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle (HUP) and Bohr's complementarity principle (BCP)
reflect the complementary aspects of reality. (2.50)
Statement 2.50 is obviously self-referential, reminiscent of the M˝bius strip, the
Klein bottle, or recursion formulas in computer science discussed in Sect.
5.2.4
.
Hence, Statement 2.50 may be referred to as the “Recursivity of Complementarity
and Uncertainty” (RCU).
It may be possible to represent the quantitative and qualitative complemen-
tarities geometrically. One possibility would be to use a pair of orthogonal axes,
one representing the
quantitative complementarity
and the other the
qualitative
complementarity
. The resulting plane may be interpreted as representing
reality
, the
source of both these complementarities.
Another way to characterize the difference between HUP and BCP may be that
HUP involves two variables (e.g., position and momentum of a moving object) that
occur within a measurement system whereas BCP implicates two independent
measurement systems that cannot be implemented simultaneously (e.g., two-slit
experiment vs. photoelectric effect measurement). That is, HUP may be viewed as
an
intra-system
principle while BCP as an
inter-system
principle.
The difficulty that Einstein and his followers have been encountering in
unifying the gravitational and other forces of nature (i.e., the electroweak and
strong forces) (Kaku and Trainer 1987) may be accounted for by BCP, if we
assume that the measurement system, A, involving the gravitational force and
that, B, involving the other forces are
complementary
in the sense of Bohr.
Complementarism would predict that these complementary opposites, A and B,
can be unified through the discovery of the C term, which was referred to as the
cosmological DNA and suggested to be identical with superstrings (Ji 1991,
pp. 154-163). If this conjecture is right, superstrings should contain not only
energy/matter
as now widely believed but also the
information
of the algorithmic
type and/or the Shannon type as was suggested in Ji (1991, p. 155). If further
research substantiates this idea, it may represent one of the rare examples of
theoretical concepts (e.g., information intrinsic to material objects) flowing from
biology to physics (see Fig.
2.6
).
