Okay, I threw you a softball with Wiki cite. How about the other one, the one written by an actual physicist? Do you think it is erroneous, or misguided?
I seem to recall that you, yourself, are a physicist (or very well versed in the subject). So, I am beginning to wonder if your objection to the notion of indistinguishability is philosophical or, um . . . how shall I put this, . . . scientific. Do you object to the concept? or do you, perhaps, know of some empirical proof that it isn’t that way, or physical reasons why it can’t be that way?
I have resuscitated this thread because ‘I discovered, while reminiscing after years of absence from this estimable board, the following long thread which also deals with precisely this topic, from just a few years earlier, and its ins and outs complement what’s here wonderfully:
But how can we be sure if you’re the same @Leo_Bloom ? Have you used a teleporter in the past 2 years ? Or undergone surgery on the private yacht of Dr. Theseus ?
In some thread or other–this thread?–@Chronos weighs in with his considerable non-resting mass on when-push-does-not-come-to-shove every electron is the same electron as far as anyone in the Universe cares.
(Please dont hate me, as usual, Chronos, if I got that really, really, wrong.)
PS I added that “@” sign in front of his name because I see that’s what all the cool kids do now here. No idea what it means. Which come to think of it isn’t that different from many of my other strings of graphemes here I have posted over the years.)
Just wanted to add that it is possible that based on the teeny-tiny colloquy in posts 26 & 27 on Heracles/Theseus and Bloom/Chronos, that I am a perdurantist, or at least perdurant-curious.
I wonder if Chronos was/is an evangelist of that sneaky bunch.
I’m having a hard time unraveling that question, but it has been seriously posited that every electron is (in some sense) the “same electron”, and there’s not really any way to refute it.
Refute it? AFAIK that is what they teach kids about quantum mechanics: suppose you have two electrons; this system can be described by a wavefunction \psi(x,y). But then \psi(y,x)=-\psi(x,y). So the electrons are the “same”, and also fermionic.
My only question was if you were a perdurant or not.
The rest was merely repeating some SD of yours, and what may be a philosopical label identifying like-minded people. Pinning philosophical labels on myself and others is an old pass-time of mine.
Googling that word, it appears to mean something that exists for an extended but finite time? If that’s what it means, then surely every person is a perdurant? But I have no idea what that has to do with the question about electrons.
My sense of this whole game/dialectic is that the philosophical gambit of the ship of Theseus gets something like a glug of fuel in its afterburner with the notion of the “identity” over time of “an” (individual) electron.
And my vanity compels me to repeat a funny I came up with some other time that ship was kicked around here, that at the time (early 21st century) I considered the Allman Brothers Band a contemporary instance.
The total extent of my deeply committed immersion in perdurance comes from this wiki entry which I came across this morning.
And as you and a zillion other people know, the novel contributions of quantum physics to the conundra of epistemology have been recognized for a century at least, and that perdure/endure rap is just one more.
And hell, when you throw in the ontological status of … stuff … whew!
Why does it matter whether we can identify a nucleus as the same nucleus we identified earlier?
If there are ways of knowing that a nucleus cannot escape some kind of confinement, we don’t have to be able to identify it repeatedly to know that its identity has not changed.
If you seal any object in a box that only you control, you know it’s the same object later.
So – can we know that a nucleus is unable to leave a situation? If it’s captive in some crystal structure for example?
We don’t know that it’s unable to leave. It might, for instance, spontaneously swap places with another nucleus of the same element and isotope somewhere in another galaxy, and we’d never know the difference.