BOHR, Niels (1885-1962). ‘Das Quantenpostulat und die neuere Entwicklung der Atomistik.’ Offprint from: Die Naturwissenschaften, 16 Jahr, Heft 15, [245]-257 pp. Berlin: Julius Springer, [1928].

BOHR, Niels (1885-1962). ‘Das Quantenpostulat und die neuere Entwicklung der Atomistik.’ Offprint from: Die Naturwissenschaften, 16 Jahr, Heft 15, [245]-257 pp. Berlin: Julius Springer, [1928].

A rare inscribed offprint issue of the foundational text of quantum philosophy. Bohr's Quantenpostulat is the first published statement of the ‘complementarity principle’: the view that quantum reality has both wave and particle aspects and must be described by both, one of the formative principles of the now-dominant Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics. Bohr first presented his idea at an international physics congress in Como in the autumn of 1927, and in early 1928 this elaboration on the topic, apparently in advance of the printing of the congress's own proceedings, appeared in both German and English in the journal Nature (English title, ‘The Quantum Postulate and the Recent Development of Atomic Theory’). According to Pais, ‘Bohr stressed that only by insisting on the description of observations in classical terms can one avoid the logical paradoxes apparently posed by the duality of particles and waves, two terms themselves defined classically. Wave and particle behavior mutually exclude each other’ (A. Pais, Niels Bohr’s Times, in Physics, Philosophy, and Polity (1991), pp. 314-315). The impact of this paper was in part responsible for Bohr's later role as one of the prime philosophical spokesmen for quantum physics: it was in this capacity that he engaged with Albert Einstein in the famous series of public debates about quantum mechanics which provoked Einstein's dictum 'God does not play dice'.

Quarto (268 x 196mm). Unbound, as issued. Provenance: Dr Victor Kuhn (inscribed to him by Bohr above caption title: ‘H. Professor Dr. Victor Kuhn, med venlig hilsen, fra Forfatteren’).

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