Position x Momentum vs Wave-Particle Complementarity Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

 Davies & Gribbin (1992: 214):

The trade-off between position and momentum is another example of quantum complementarity at work. It turns out to bear a close relation to the wave-particle complementarity. The wave associated with an electron is, by its very nature, a spread-out thing, and does not have a definite position, although it does encode information about the electron's momentum. By contrast, the particle associated with an electron is, by its very nature, something with a well-defined position; but a wave collapsed to a point carries no information about the momentum of the electron. Measure the position of an electron, and you do not know (nor does the electron know) how it is moving; measure the momentum of an electron, and neither you nor the electron know where it is located.

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, the trade-off between position and momentum and wave-particle complementarity differ in an important way.

Wave-particle complementarity is a complementarity of perspective: the view of phenomena as potential (wave) or instance (particle).

The 'trade-off' between position and momentum, on the other hand, is an inversely proportional relation between instantiation probabilities: the more probable the construal of one, the less probable the construal of the other.