Speaker
Description
Five years after introducing his ‘complementarity’ concept in 1927, Niels Bohr gave an unexpected address at the International Congress on Light Therapy titled ‘Light and Life’. In the lecture, Bohr used the concept of light to bridge new knowledge from quantum physics with the life-sciences, and noted that “light is our principal tool for observation.” What led Bohr to present an interdisciplinary analysis of light to a group of dermatologists? And how did he use light as an epistemological tool in his philosophy of quantum mechanics? This epistemological framing of light is a crucial, yet unresearched, key in Bohr’s philosophy. While the impact of Bohr’s lecture has been researched by historians, such as its influence on Delbrück’s biological research, there is no account of its genesis. Studies of Bohr’s interest in biology rarely examine interdisciplinary activities at his institute in the 1920s. Using drafts and letters from the Bohr archive, this talk points to the significance of several Danish chemists, dermatologists, ophthalmologists, and surgeons in Bohr’s intellectual circle, many working at his Institute during the emergence of quantum theory in two ways: first, this cohort of peers contributed to Bohr’s philosophical turn to biology in the late 1920s. Second, the group’s discussed ideas migrated into foundational concepts in Bohr’s philosophy, explaining what he called “the epistemological lesson of quantum mechanics”. These include clarifying biology’s influence on complementarity, distinguishing mechanical vs. quantum concepts, using the organism as a metaphor for open and closed systems, and exploring the object/subject distinction in observation.
