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98 First Steps to Jainism
H. Yukawa, the Japanese physicist who predicted the existence of the mesons on the basis of the principle of complementarity, was asked whether young physicists in Japan found the same great difficulty in comprehending the idea of complementarity as physicists do in the West. He replied that Bohr's complementarity always appeared to them as quite evident. "You see we in Japan have not been corrupted by Aristotle (Aristotle's Logic)", he added. How much more would it be true of India if Syadvada was a part of Indian education-but our formal education (till recently ?) has hardly any Indian roots.
It is interesting to recall that Bohr as a student attended Hoffding lectures on formal logic and on the history of philosophy. He liked Spinoza's concept of the psychophysical parallelism, but later rejected it, as parallelism is not a true expression of complementarity. He read Kierkegaard. He was much impressed by Paul Muller's "Tale of Danish Student", a delightful humorous story of Hegelian dialectics. A soul-searching research scholar struggles desperately to unravel the intricacies of human thinking. How can a thought arise in the mind ? "And before you think it, you must have had an idea of it, otherwise how could it have occured to you to think it ? And so it goes on to infinity, and this infinity enclosed in an instant". And while the scholar is trying to prove that thoughts cannot move, in that very process the thoughts are rapidly moving. We are involved in an inexplicable contradiction. (L. Rosenfeld, Physics Today, Oct, 1963.). All this is so similar to the celebrated Zeno's paradox on the impossibility of motion of objects.
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Language and Reality
At this point a few words about ambiguities and contradictions inherent in ordinary language may be in order. Bohr's first and continuing preoccupation with philosophical problems related to the use of language for unambiguously describing our experiences. A fundamental difficulty in this regard arises from the inescapable fact that man is both actor and spectator in the universe, an idea that was Bohr's favourite reflection. Thus, when I am 'seeing' a thing, I am also
acting' : my choice to see the particular thing is an 'act', on my part. We often use the same word to describe a state of our consciousness and of the associated, accompanying behaviour of the body. How to avoid the ambiguity? Bohr drew attention to the beautiful analogy of the concepts of multiform
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