QUANTUM METAPHYSICS - E-thesis

dependent in experience. The essential idea, however, was preserved. In every historical situation
we are bound to our own structure, capabilities, language and theories, and we investigate the
world through the spectacles that these provide. Our observational and communicational
capabilities, and the level of knowledge we possess, unavoidably shape the picture of reality that
we obtain. Bohr saw that description could not be used as a direct bridge from theory to
independent of reality. Whatever the actual character of the atomic world, it was not visualisable
with the help of classical models which required an observational environment independent of
the influence of the observer.
Generalisation of the concept of complementarity
Bohr is said to have developed the idea of complementarity as a result of his father’s influence.
His father was a physiologist. At the time when mechanistic and reductionist explanations were
believed in, Bohr the elder defended teleological explanations. He did not consider these
different methods of explanation to be contradictory, just complementary. Investigating the
mechanism of an organism required that it be killed, which made research into living things
impossible and vice versa. Circumstances in which the other form of description could be used
shut out use of the other method of description. 653 Whether he was influenced by his father or
not, the younger Bohr started little by little to notice that complementarity was new only in
physics, in which, because of the quantum effect, phenomena could no longer be investigated as
being fully isolated from the measuring device. He saw the complementary method of
description as something traditionally used in areas where taking account of the conditions in
which phenomena occurred had been essential from the very beginning. 654
Physical description had to be generalized by complementary approach when the assumption that
physical systems could be investigated in a manner which was independent of the observer had
been shown to be an simplified idealisation. At the same time, complementarity generalised the
question of whether nature was fundamentally deterministic or indeterministic. According to
Bohr, causal descriptions were only possible when the phenomena being handled were
independent of any influential interaction with the observation:
653 Powers 1982, 133.
654 Bohr 1963, 60, 78 ja 93. As the state function is a solution of the Schrödinger equation which fulfils the
boundary conditions corresponding to the experimental situation, ’circumstances’ in quantum mechanics are defined
by the experimental arrangements which appear as boundary conditions. Laurikainen 1997, 40.
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