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Distinguishable versus identical Consider two billiard balls. They may look and feel perfectly identical, painted precisely the same color. But you know, just know, deep down in your heart, that they are not identical. The two balls are made of different chunks of wood. They may be indistinguishable in practice, but surely not in principle. If only you had a more precise scale, you could show that their masses are slightly different. Or, if you had a powerful enough microscope, you could see that their surface textures are different.But when physicists venture into the quantum domain, they have to confront the issue of whether different hydrogen atoms are distinguishable or not, and whether two electrons are distinguishable or not. Even in principle, we have no way of telling two electrons apart. Electrons are all identical. In the quantum world, individual identity does not exist.The issue at hand, that of identity, is not a matter of idle philosophical hyperventilation. In particular, in the statistical physics championed by Boltzmann and others toward the end of the 19th century, to calculate the thermodynamic properties of a gas, physicists have to count the number of possible

Publisher

Princeton University Press

Published

2022

Language

EN