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Word Gems
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Quantum Mechanics
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Virtual Reality: the identical, interchangeable nature of "particles" and measured properties; as though the "particles" were merely pictures of particles, like computer icons.
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from the website http://www.bottomlayer.com/bottom/argument/Argument4.pdf
III. The Identical, Interchangeable Nature of "Particles" and Measured Properties; as though the "particles" were merely pictures of particles, like computer icons.
Quantum units of the same type are identical. Every electron is exactly the same as every other electron; every photon the same as every other photon; etc.
How identical are they? So identical that Feynman was able seriously to propose that all the electrons and positrons in the universe actually are the same electron/positron, which merely has zipped back and forth in time so often that we observe it once for each of the billions of times it crosses our own time, so it seems like we are seeing billions of electrons.
If you were to study an individual quantum unit from a collection, you would find nothing to distinguish it from any other quantum unit of the same type. Nothing whatsoever.
Upon regrouping the quantum units, you could not, even in principle, distinguish which was the unit you had been studying and which was another.
The complete and utter sameness of each electron (or other quantum unit) has a number of consequences in physics. If the mathematical formula describing one electron is the same as that describing another electron, then there is no method, even in principle, of telling which is which.
This means, for example, that if you begin with two quantum electrons at positions A and B, and move them to positions C and D, you cannot state whether they traveled the paths A to C and B to D, or A to D and B to C. In such a situation, there is no way to identify the electron at an end position with one or the other of the electrons at a beginning position; therefore, you must allow for the possibility that each electron at A and B arrived at either C or D.
This impacts on the math predicting what will happen in any given quantum situation and, as it turns out, the final probabilities agree with this interchangeable state of affairs.
the computer analogy
Roger Penrose has likened this sameness to the images produced by a
computer. Imagine the letter "t." On the page you are viewing, the letter "t" appears many times. Every letter t is exactly like every other letter t. That is because on a computer, the letter t is produced by displaying a particular set of pixels on the screen.
You could not, even in principle, tell one from the other because each
is the identical image of a letter t. The formula for this image is buried in many layers of subroutines for displaying pixels, and the image does not change regardless of whether it is called upon to form part of the word "mathematical" or "marital".
Similarly, an electron does not change regardless of whether it is one of the two electrons associated with the helium atom, or one of the ninety-two electrons associated with the uranium atom.
You could not, even in principle, tell one from another. The only way in
this world to create such identical images is to use the same formula to produce the same image, over and over again whenever a display of the image is called for.
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