Related papers: Are All Particles Identical?
In Bohmian mechanics elementary particles exist objectively, as point particles moving according to a law determined by a wavefunction. In this context, questions as to whether the particles of a certain species are real--questions such as,…
A type of mechanics will be presented that possesses some distinctive properties. On the one hand, its physical description & rules of operation are readily comprehensible & intuitively clear. On the other, it fully satisfies all observable…
Bohmian mechanics is a theory about point particles moving along trajectories. It has the property that in a world governed by Bohmian mechanics, observers see the same statistics for experimental results as predicted by quantum mechanics.…
Bohmian mechanics is the most naively obvious embedding imaginable of Schr\"odinger's equation into a completely coherent physical theory. It describes a world in which particles move in a highly non-Newtonian sort of way, one which may at…
If, in a system of identical particles, the one particle state is defined by the partial trace to one of the component spaces of the total Hilbert space, then all one particle states are identical. The particles are indistinguishable. This…
According to classical physics particles are basic building blocks of the world. Classical particles are distinguishable objects, individuated by physical characteristics. By contrast, in quantum mechanics the standard view is that…
Bohmian mechanics is a theory that provides a consistent explanation of quantum phenomena in terms of point particles whose motion is guided by the wave function. In this theory, the state of a system of particles is defined by the actual…
The Gibbs paradox has frequently been interpreted as a sign that particles of the same kind are fundamentally indistinguishable; and that quantum mechanics, with its identical fermions and bosons, is indispensable for making sense of this.…
The symmetrization postulates of quantum mechanics (symmetry for bosons, antisymmetry for fermions) are usually taken to entail that \emph{quantum particles} of the same kind (e.g., electrons) are all in exactly the same state and therefore…
We study the problem of particle indistinguishability for the three cases known in nature: identical classical particles, identical bosons and identical fermions. By exploiting the fact that different types of particles are associated with…
Bohmian mechanics solves the wave-particle duality paradox by introducing the concept of a physical particle that is always point-like and a separate wavefunction with some sort of physical reality. However, this model has not been…
I address the problem of explaining why wave functions for identical particles must be either symmetric or antisymmetric (the symmetry dichotomy) within two interpretations of quantum mechanics which include particles following definite…
In order to arrive at Bohmian mechanics from standard nonrelativistic quantum mechanics one need do almost nothing! One need only complete the usual quantum description in what is really the most obvious way: by simply including the…
It is shown that quantum systems of identical particles can be treated as if they were different when they are in well differentiated states. This simplifying assumption allows the consideration of quantum systems isolated from the rest of…
Since the particles such as molecules, atoms and nuclei are composite particles, it is important to recognize that physics must be invariant for the composite particles and their constituent particles, this requirement is called particle…
We explain why, in a configuration space that is multiply connected, i.e., whose fundamental group is nontrivial, there are several quantum theories, corresponding to different choices of topological factors. We do this in the context of…
Bohmian mechanics represents the universe as a set of paths with a probability measure defined on it. The way in which a mathematical model of this kind can explain the observed phenomena of the universe is examined in general. It is shown…
A quantum fractal is a wavefunction with a real and an imaginary part continuous everywhere, but differentiable nowhere. This lack of differentiability has been used as an argument to deny the general validity of Bohmian mechanics (and…
We discuss a recently proposed extension of Bohmian mechanics to quantum field theory. For more or less any regularized quantum field theory there is a corresponding theory of particle motion, which in particular ascribes trajectories to…
It is shown that Bohmian mechanics is internally consistent in the sense that the equations of motion typically have global solutions despite the fact that the velocity field is singular at the nodes of the wave function and at other…