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A Critique
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complementarity! is the best explanation of the dual character of light (and no one has thought of a better one yet) by emphasizing the complementary nature of both aspects-both of them are essential to understand the nature of light. But one of them always excludes the other, because light or anything else cannot be both - wave-like and particle-like-in the same context. It is meaningless to ask which one of them, alone, is the way light really is. It behaves like waves or particles depending upon which experiment we perform. And this, precisely, is the Jain position as we have seen earlier.
Neither the wave-like nor the particle-like behaviour is the quality (guna) of light, but both are its modes (paryāya), just as sound is not a quality of pudgala, as 'colour' is, but its modification. Each aspect is produced by the interaction of light to manifest either particle-like or wave-like characteristics or both as in the famous Arthur Compton's 'Scattering of X-rays" in 1923. It should be noted that by denying the dual aspects to be qualities, we are not denying the objective reality of light. Both qualities and modes are real and are determinate ways of manifesting a real substance, which in this case, is pudgala.
DARKNESS
While light is universally accepted as the cause of visibility and a form of material energy, darkness is regarded by some as mere absence of light and not as a separate entity (modification of matter). In Jain view, tamaḥ or darkness, which is the antithesis of light and the cause of reduced visibility, is regarded as an entity
1. The Copenhagen Interpretation (CI) of Quantum Mechanics was the first consistent formulation of quantum physics and marks the emergence of the new physics as a consistent way of viewing the physical reality. It was arrived at the 5th Solvey Congress in 1927, at which Bohr and Einstein conducted their now famous debates. The term 'Copenhagen' reflects the dominant influence of Bohr (From Copenhagen) and his school of thought. Bohr's principle of complementarity is an essential feature of CI of quantum physics. Some physicists practically equate CI and complementarity. It is subsumed in a general way in Stapp's pragmatic interpretation of quantum physics, but the special emphasis on complementarity is characteristic of CI. The CI. is considered to be the beginning of the reunion of the Cartesian division. It says that quantum theory is about correlations in our experiences. It is about what will be observed under specified conditions.
