R: Duplication Thought Experiment Involving Complementarity

From: scerir <scerir.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Sun, 8 Sep 2002 23:42:51 +0200

        George Levy:
        5) Is complementarity anthropically necessary?
 
I may be wrong but it seems to me that complementarity
is nothing more, and nothing less than a consequence
of the finiteness of (quantum) information.
 
It seems also that the complementarity principle is
a "smooth" principle. When we say, i.e. following von
Weizsaeker, that localization and superposition are
complementary, we mean that the predictability of the
path plus the visibility of the interference fringes (in the
double slit experiment) equals a certain constant.
 
There is a "smooth" transition between the wave-like
behavior and the particle-like behaviour.
 
Wootters and Zurek [see "Complementarity in the Double-
Slit Experiment: Quantum Nonseparability and a
Quantitative Statement of Bohr's Principle", in
Physical Review, D19, (1979)] showed that a photon
still has a wave-like behaviour even if the path
(the which way in a double-slit experiment) is
predicted almost certainly. Their gedanken
experiment is very simple: a single-slit
+ a double-slit + a screen.
 
Thus to me the question "Is complementarity anthropically
necessary?" means "Can *we* get infinite information
from a single quantum?".
 



 


 
Received on Sun Sep 08 2002 - 14:39:27 PDT