This book offers a discussion of Niels Bohr’s conception of “complementarity,” arguably his greatest contribution to physics and philosophy. By tracing Bohr’s work from his 1913 atomic theory to the introduction and then refinement of the idea of complementarity, and by explicating different meanings of “complementarity” in Bohr and the relationships between it and Bohr’s other concepts, the book aims to offer a contained and accessible, and yet sufficiently comprehensive account of Bohr’s work on complementarity and its significance.

Arkady Plotnitsky is a professor of Theory and Cultural Studies at Purdue University, where he is also a director of the Theory and Cultural Studies Program, and a co-director of the Philosophy and Literature Program. He has published extensively on philosophy of physics and mathematics, continental philosophy, British and European Romanticism, Modernism, and the relationships among literature, philosophy, and science. His most recent books are Epistemology and Probability: Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger and the Nature of Quantum-Theoretical Thinking (2009), Reading Bohr: Physics and Philosophy (2006), and a co-edited (with Tilottama Rajan) collection of essays Idealism Without Absolute: Philosophy and Romantic Culture (2004).