Wiseman 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: Wiseman 15 April 2008 04:07:44PM 0 points [-]

Ben Jones: Well that's just plain wrong.... QM is the most experimentally validated theory we have, but one of its implications is the relative identity of quanta.

The experiments show specific results, but it may be possible that some properties of the particles aren't interacting with any aspect of the experiment, thus QM would still be correct in the explanation for the original experiments, but not complete, as they don't explain the additional properties. So it is entirely possible.

The generality "invalidating one aspect of a theory can't invalidate the whole" may be a bit too extreme, but for practical purposes most theories are complex enough that that usually won't happen, it and it certainly wouldn't in the case of QM and particle identity.