mitchell_porter2 comments on Can You Prove Two Particles Are Identical? - Less Wrong

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

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (106)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: mitchell_porter2 14 April 2008 09:20:11AM 0 points [-]

OK, the problem is that second sentence from Dirac, "interference between two different photons never occurs". Google that and the name "glauber" and go to Google Books and you will get the beginning of an explanation. He is talking about branches of the single-particle wavefunctions which enter into a multi-particle wavefunction (tensored together and then symmetrized), and saying that you don't have a branch from one particle interfering with a branch from another particle. Dirac was not writing from a configuration-centric perspective, so his idioms are different. But I think his point could be reexpressed in your language should it prove necessary.