Topics Physics

Question In a book by John Honner dealing with Niels Bohr's philosophy of physics, he finishes a sentence with "once the framework of complementarity is substituted for that of continuity and univocity." I can't find a definition of 'univocity' in the dictionary, and all google search results seem to apply to religion. Can someone help me with a definition that might apply in this context?

Accepted:
February 13, 2014

Comments

The best word to look up is univocal, which is roughly the opposite of equivocal. It means, more or less, unambiguous, or having one meaning. Without the whole sentence, it's a bit hard to be sure what the author meant, but the idea of complementarity, in part, is that we can't bring pairs of concepts such as position and momentum both to bear in a single experiment; we must choose. In classical physics, we can. There is, as it were, a univocal point of view that we can take on a physical system classically, whereas in applying quantum theory we must choose between incompatible experimental arrangements and "complementary" physical concepts.