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The Complementarity Principle and Syādvāda
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indeterminacy principle, make the y coordinate of Puncertain by an amount Ay>h/(hve/c): that is, Ay>/e. But for observation of interference fringes, it is necessary that this uncertainty be less than the fringe spacing, which requires Ay to be less than ^/ 0. For interference fringes to be produced, photons must in some sense go through both holes, but this can happen only if we forgo any attempt to observe them. It is because of this mutual exclusiveness of the two setups (a) and (b) that the particle and the wave aspects are complementary and not contradictory.
A similar situation would apply if one observed Xrays scattered from the atom in the two-compartment box. One could either locate the atom as being in one compartment or the other, or one could observe an interference pattern arising from its partial presence in both compartments. Moreover, choosing at a given instant ("now") to make one type of observation or the other would seem to imply that this decision influenced the state of the atom at an earlier time (earlier by the transit time of Xrays from the atom to the plate). This looks
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(b)
B
utterly strange. The lesson is that the behavior of “small objects” is not visualizable. It is not describable in ordinary language. Nevertheless it is real. As Wheeler has remarked:
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