This is of course trivially explained by the particle idea.
This is of course trivially explained by the particle idea.
You can smoothly deform vector fields through time, and there are different features you can notice: zeros of opposite index annihilating each other, zeros of opposite index appearing out of nowhere, and other sorts of combinations of zeros combining and splitting.
For the surface of a ball, the Euler characteristic is 2, so the sum of indices must be two, so it seems spheres must be "positively charged," if index and charge are actually analogous. For a torus, the Euler characteristic is 0, so the "charge" is neutral. For a plane, on the other hand, the theorem I mentioned doesn't quite work because it requires a compact manifold, but a vector field could have any total index (though there will be a virtual zero at infinity which always has the opposite index).
If measuring charge corresponds to finding the total index in a region of space, then maybe that's why it's only ever an integer.
The field idea, as discussed here, actually explains why all electrons are identical: because they're all quantized excitations of the same field. It's the quantization that really does the trick, but after all that's how we got started here.
Regarding field quantisation - why should the electron field be quantised?
However, what it doesn't explain, is why the amplitudes of such wavefunctions should be what they are. For example, why should the integral of the squared norm of the wavefunction for an electron be 1, if it is not a particle?
Just as the Euclidean metric fails on a gridded plane where one would instead use the Taxicab metric (ds = \sum _{i=1}^{n}|p_{i}-q_{i}|), and the problem persists to higher spatial dimensions, the 3+1 Minkowski metric of Special Relativity fails on a discretized spacetime, and one would have to use a metric appropriate for whichever dimension(s) is/are discrete. Assuming it's not just the timelike dimension that's discrete, the Taxicab metric is readily generalized to small patches of 3+1 spacetime, just like the Euclidean metric.
The other part of Special Relativity is important here: the fundamental actions that are invariant under translations, rotations and boosts -- Poincaré invariance -- is impossible to fully recover from a spacetime that does not admit the Minkowski metric; the best we can do with a metric on discretized spacetime is where the discrete steps are extremely small.
The firm upper limit, from experiment and astrophysical observation, on discretization approaches the Planck length. [0]
There is plenty of literature about violations of the full Poincaré symmetry under discrete spacetime (especially violations of Lorentz invariance; the Lorentz group is a subgroup of the Poincaré group). example at [1]
Essentially, the problem is that in a discrete spacetime a boosted observer could see a Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction acting on the minimal length, further contracting it. The ways around that are either extremely shaky as there is lots of conflict with experiment (e.g. fixing a preferred rest frame) or extremely subtle (e.g., UV corrections to the smooth Lie groups of the Standard Model or replacements for them that reproduce existing IR results e.g. by replacing the metric with an operator (but see also [0] again vs [3]).
Some further detail on Sabine Hossenfelder's blog: http://backreaction.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/dear-dr-b-why-is-...
[0] http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/9812418 [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0112090 but for contrast [2] http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.2610 and http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0405085 which shows that in a toy 2+1d model with a discrete spacetime, Lorentz invariance can be recovered by introducing non-local interactions; it is only suggestive with respect to our 3+1d spacetime, however. [3] http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0205108