Complementarity and justification in science,or comments on some fundamental concepts and problems in the theory and methods of structure and property investigations of complex molecules and molecular systems

Major problems in using some key notions of the theory of structure, such as bond length and potential function parameters, are discussed on the basis of the general complementarity principle formulated by Bohr. It is shown that the use of this principle and model representations, indispensable in microworld studies, inevitably involves subjectivism arising in the solution of inverse problems, and leads to the violation of the requirement of reason. Vernadskii Institute of Geochemistry and Analytical Chemistry, Russian Academy of Sciences Translated fromZhurnal Strukturnoi Khimii, Vol. 35, No. 4, pp. 123–134, July–August, 1994. Translated by O. Kharlamova