Niels Bohr’s contribution to epistemology
DOI: 10.1063/1.3050562
When I was staying at Yukawa’s Institute in Kyoto two years ago, I had occasion to discuss Bohr’s ideas with the great Japanese physicist, whose conception of the meson with its complementary aspects of elementary particle and field of nuclear force is one of the most striking illustrations of the fruitfulness of the new way of looking at things that we owe to Niels Bohr. I asked Yukawa whether the Japanese physicists had experienced the same difficulty as their Western colleagues in assimilating the idea of complementarity and in adapting themselves to it. He answered, “No, Bohr’s argumentation has always appeared quite evident to us;” and, as I expressed surprise, he added, with his aristocratic smile, “You see, we in Japan have not been corrupted by Aristotle.”
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L. Rosenfeld, Nordic Institute for Theoretical Atomic Physics, Copenhagen.
