06 Of Contraries and Complementarity

Your squiggle sense allows you to hold opposites in your mind, suspending your normal thinking process and allowing an intelligence beyond rational thought to create a new form. It senses the complementary nature as myriad dances of what Niels Bohr called, contraria sunt complementa: contraries are complementary. Somehow he was able to hold opposite theories of light (as waves and as particles) in his mind and suspend normal ways of thinking about them. This allowed an intelligence beyond the usual way of thinking about competing theories (is light a wave or a particle?) to create a new form, which became known as the Complementarity Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (QM). For Bohr, whether light is a wave-like or particle-like phenomenon depends on the experimental arrangement used to measure it. Strange but true.