Wind comments on Can You Prove Two Particles Are Identical? - Less Wrong

32 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 14 April 2008 07:06AM

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Comment author: Wind 12 April 2016 12:04:02AM 0 points [-]

Yes, technically, you could maybe do that. At least as long as you don't have two photons occupying the same state, in which case I am unsure.

However, your generat quantum state does not have a precis number of photons. So before you can start flag anything, you would have to express the quantum state as a sum of states that has an exact number of photons. Then you could, separately for each term in that sum, label each photon. And then, a moment later, you would have to do that all over again. Because you cannot track over time which photon is which.

So why would you go in to all that trouble to invent an epiphonomena?