Friday, June 18, 2010

Bohr vs. Hegel


I made a timeline for my class of the "light is wave / light is a particle" battle, started by Huygens and Newton; ended by Bohr over 200 years later:
Bohr is often quoted on this subject:

“There exist two sorts of truth:
trivialities, where opposites are obviously absurd, and
profound truths, recognised by the fact that the opposite is also a profound truth.”

This strikes me a slightly more profound and deep version of old Hegelian Dialectic:
 

Sometimes there is no satisfactory synthesis - the thesis and antithesis stay opposites while both remaining true.  The interesting thing to me is the apparent contradiction is only in our own minds, not out there in nature...

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