Luke_A_Somers comments on No Individual Particles - Less Wrong

15 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 18 April 2008 04:40AM

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Comment author: Luke_A_Somers 21 October 2011 01:49:43PM 2 points [-]

As I understand it, an electron isn't an excitation of a quantum electron field, like a wave in the aether; the electron is a blob of amplitude-factor in a subspace of a configuration space whose points correspond to multiple point positions in quantum fields, etc.

It all depends what you mean by quantum field, doesn't it? If you mean '4-dimensional vector field', then yes. But that's not what's meant by Quantum Field - rather, it'd be a 'Fock space', a special subspace of Hilbert space. Using that, the first is more accurate. An electron IS an excitation in this quantum field of electrons in the Fock space. This excitation only exists in the subspaces of the Fock space corresponding to that electron's existence (referring to 'that' electron by there being an electron in that region of spacetime).

This is the first thing I've found that I'd categorize as not even technically right (I skipped this page on my first time through).