Heisenberg and the wave-particle duality

Abstract

This paper examines the development and meaning of Heisenberg's notion of wave-particle equivalence and the way in which it differs from Bohr's more widely known notion of wave-particle complementarity. According to the statistical interpretation of the wave function, developed by Born and Pauli in 1926, the electron is treated as a particle, though it cannot be assigned a well-defined position and momentum at a given time. On the other hand, from the vantage point of quantum electrodynamics developed by Jordan, Klein and Wigner in 1927-1928, the electron is described as a quantized matter wave in three-dimensional space. Heisenberg brought these two empirically equivalent approaches togethe..