The Duality of Time Theory

It was found that objects have complementary properties which cannot all be observed or measured simultaneously. This complementarity principle was formulated by Bohr during a skiing vacation in 1927, where he considered the examples of:

•position and momentum •energy and duration •spin on different axes •wave and particle •value of a field and its change at a certain position

Bohr also noticed that his complementarity principle is the underlying reality behind Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which was in publication process at the time, so Heisenberg appended a note to his paper before its publication, stating: “Bohr has brought to my attention [that] the uncertainty in our observation does not arise exclusively from the occurrence of discontinuities, but is tied directly to the demand that we ascribe equal validity to the quite different experiments which show up in the [particulate] theory on one hand, and in the wave theory on the other hand.” Baggott (2011)

Complementarity and uncertainty restriction is not due to any inaccurate measurements or lack of knowledge about these complementary properties, but due to the limitations imposed by the manifestation of physical entities, whose properties exist only in pairs, which Bohr described as complementary or conjugate pairs. For this reason, all properties and actions in the physical world manifest themselves as non-deterministic to some degree. Any observation or measurement may reveal only certain aspects of the system on the expense of others, while another observation may reveal these other complementary aspects, but then the previous aspects are no longer well defined. As Bohr noted, the principle of complementarity “implies the impossibility of any sharp separation between the behavior of atomic objects and the interaction with the measuring instruments that serve to define the conditions under which the phenomena appear.” McEvoy (2001)