Complementarity Viewed Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Davies & Gribbin (1992: 201-2):

It is hard to see how something can be both a wave and a particle at the same time, and the discovery of the dual nature of both light and electrons caused a great deal of puzzlement at first. When physicists began to speak of wave-particle duality, they meant not that an electron was both wave and particle simultaneously, but that it could manifest either a wave or a particle aspect depending on circumstances.

Bohr extended the idea of wave-particle duality into something known as the principle of complementarity, which recognises that seemingly incompatible physical qualities might be complementary rather than contradictory. Thus the wave and particle nature of electrons can be regarded as complementary aspects of a single reality, like the two sides of a coin. An electron can behave sometimes as a wave and sometimes as a particle, but never as both together, just as a tossed coin may fall either heads or tails up, but not both at once.

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, wave-particle duality is the duality of potential and instance, which together constitute complementary perspectives on the same phenomenon (like climate and weather). In this view, electrons are particles (instances) whose statistical behaviours instantiate the probabilities of waves (potential). In a sense, the wave is a theory of the particle (as climate is a theory of weather).