In a previous post in this series, it was stated that if you shot the particles towards the mirrors at different times, but that difference was vanishingly small, then you would still see the same results, except for there would be a correspondingly vanishingly small chance that you would see both detectors register a single particle, since configurations were "smudgy". Why would not the same apply to two electrons that were distinguishable, but their differences were vanishingly small?
This would work only if the configurations were smudgy along the dimension on which the particles were different, so that the smudges could overlap.
Today's post, Can You Prove Two Particles Are Identical? was originally published on 14 April 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Where Philosophy Meets Science, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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