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How does your experiment demonstrate that all protons are indistinguishable? Couldn't it be that your measurement for a proton being at A' is simply measuring

How does your experiment demonstrate that all protons are indistinguishable? Couldn't it be that your measurement for a proton being at A' is simply measuring the wrong feature of the protons? edit: I have no idea if protons are indistinguishable from one another, but this experiment doesn't seem compelling.

MrLeap 5y ago
I was thinking the same thing. If you read the experiment described but replace the word "proton" with "cat" -- I would just assume that the scientists in question were from a society with very coarse senses and measurements, not that all cats are indistinguishable.
- mcswell 5y ago
  In some versions of object oriented programming, some aspects of objects can be queried from the outside, some cannot--they are invisible states. For protons, they may come with a serial number, but we're not allowed to read it because of the constraints built into God's programming language.
- arbitrage 5y ago
  It's a mistake to try to make analogies of quantum interactions with everyday objects like cats. It's not as useful as one might hope, and your intuition gets in the way. Protons don't behave like cats.
xwolfi 5y ago
Turn it the other way around: if it has a different level of energy in its quantum field, it doesnt expose the properties of what we call "a proton".
scott_s 5y ago
Think of it this way: we can experimentally figure out what the probabilities are; they are an observed thing. The only way to make sense of these probabilities is if all protons are indistinguishable. In my statistical mechanics course, we went through an illuminating exercise where we started by trying to take account of every atom in a gas cloud. We started taking limits and making assumptions. One of them was that all atoms are indistinguishable from each other. This decreases the possible states of the system by N! (factorial, not surprise). After making that assumption, out pops the ideal gas law.
- MrLeap 5y ago
  This is convincing to me, thank you.

MrLeap 5y ago

I was thinking the same thing. If you read the experiment described but replace the word "proton" with "cat" -- I would just assume that the scientists in question were from a society with very coarse senses and measurements, not that all cats are indistinguishable.

mcswell 5y ago
In some versions of object oriented programming, some aspects of objects can be queried from the outside, some cannot--they are invisible states. For protons, they may come with a serial number, but we're not allowed to read it because of the constraints built into God's programming language.
arbitrage 5y ago
It's a mistake to try to make analogies of quantum interactions with everyday objects like cats. It's not as useful as one might hope, and your intuition gets in the way. Protons don't behave like cats.

xwolfi 5y ago

Turn it the other way around: if it has a different level of energy in its quantum field, it doesnt expose the properties of what we call "a proton".

scott_s 5y ago

Think of it this way: we can experimentally figure out what the probabilities are; they are an observed thing. The only way to make sense of these probabilities is if all protons are indistinguishable. In my statistical mechanics course, we went through an illuminating exercise where we started by trying to take account of every atom in a gas cloud. We started taking limits and making assumptions. One of them was that all atoms are indistinguishable from each other. This decreases the possible states of the system by N! (factorial, not surprise). After making that assumption, out pops the ideal gas law.

MrLeap 5y ago
This is convincing to me, thank you.