On a Recent Critique of Complementarity: Part II

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Abstract
“Bohr was primarily a philosopher, not a physicist, but he understood that natural philosophy ... carries weight only if its every detail can be subjected to the ... test of experiment” (Heisenberg in [59], p. 95). As a result his approach differed from that of the school-philosophers whom he regarded with a somewhat “sceptical attitude, to say the least” ([59], p. 129) and whose lack of interest in “the important viewpoint which had emerged during the development of atomic physics” he noticed with regret ([59], p. 183). But it also differed, and to a considerable degree, from the spirit of what Professor T. S. Kuhn has called a “normal science.” Looking at Bohr's method of research we see that technical problems, however remote, are always related to a philosophical point of view; they are never treated as “tiny puzzles” whose solution is valuable in itself, even if one has not the faintest idea what it means, and where it leads: “For me” Bohr writes to Sommerfeld in 1922 ([59], p. 71) “[the quantum theory] is not a matter for petty didactic details, but a serious attempt to reach ... an inner coherence.” Emphasis is put on matters of principle ([59], p. 36) and minor discrepancies, or “puzzles” in the sense of Kuhn, instead of being deemphasized, and assimilated to the older paradigm, are turned into fundamental difficulties by looking at them from a new direction, and by testing their background “in its furthest consequences by exaggeration” ([59], p. 329). A noteworthy example of Bohr's “non-normal” and rather metaphysical approach to physics is his scepticism in the face of the success of his own atomic model.