Abstract
In this paper we review some of the main ideas of two previous papers of ours which deal with an application of a kind of paraconsistent logic to quantum physics [14, 15]. We think that this revision is justified to present once more the richness of paraconsistent logics and suggests a way of dealing with one of most intriguing concepts of quantum theory. We propose and interpretation of complementarity in terms of what we call \(\mathcal {C}\)-theories (theories involving the idea of complementarity, in a sense explained in the text), whose underlying logic is a kind of paraconsistent logic termed paraclassical logic. Roughly speaking, \(\mathcal {C}\)-theories which may have ‘physically’ incompatible theorems (and, in particular, contradictory theorems), but which are not trivial.
The apparently incompatible sorts of information about the behavior of the object under examination which we get by different experimental arrangements can clearly not be brought into connection with each other in the usual way, but may, as equally essential for an exhaustive account of all experience, be regarded as ‘complementary’ to each other.
Niels Bohr (1937), p. 291
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the organizers of this volume for the opportunity of presenting this paper and dedicate it to Jair Minoro Abe, our friend and colleague of so many years.
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da Costa, N.C.A., Krause, D. (2016). An Application of Paraconsistent Logic to Physics: Complementarity. In: Akama, S. (eds) Towards Paraconsistent Engineering. Intelligent Systems Reference Library, vol 110. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40418-9_3
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