The Theory That There Is Only One Electron in the Universe

Wouldn't this be explained by the mass attraction of the electron alone in point A, vs the aggregate attraction of the electron creating a larger "cloud" by being at multiple points (to e.g. form a whole sun)?

As long as this "jumping from point to point" is immediate (or much faster than the speed of transmition of gravity attraction due to mass), that would appear as a much higher mass, no?

A mass of a particle tells you how hard you need to hit the field to create this elementary excitation. And this is where the analogy breaks, since a classical field doesn't have this "quantization" of energy, you can create arbitrarily small waves. Whereas in a quantum field, there's a minimum energy that you need to put to excite it and make an electron show up, and that is the mass. It also acts a bit like the (inverse) width of the wave - the higher the mass the smaller the width and thus the more spacially localized it is.

Technically the statement that all electrons are the same is the "correct" one, because technically there's only one "state of the electron field" which is described by a bunch of excitations here and there. So the total mass (or more precisely, the energy state that the field occupies) is actually a huge mess that happens to be easily factorizeable into a bunch of localized states. This is only possible because interactions are extremely weak and thus we can just "sum the electrons". But if all of a sudden the electron charge were to become massive, to the point where electrons would start interacting at much bigger distances, the concept of individual electrons would start to become complicated and we'd need to think about them in some other way (like what happens with quarks and gluons)

When Wheeler came up with his idea, antimatter had just been discovered and positrons were the only known form of it at the time. So he was trying to explain why electrons/positrons are so alike, and yet not alike. In other words, just a historical accident that he applied his idea solely to electrons.

But yes, as new antimatter particles were subsequently discovered, his idea could be applied to those as well. In fact, if you're a believer in string theory, one could imagine that there's one fundamental string particle that's moving back and forth through time, creating all the other particles as it does so.

Practically speaking, what is the difference?

This is of course a sarcastic aside, but I have to admit even toying with the idea of throwing out observations you don't like feels really good. I see why for some unbinding their beliefs from the constraints of reality is so appealing.

I have 2 olives in my martini glass right now. I can see, feel, smell, and even hear them if I throw them. So we say they are "real" and it makes perfect sense for 99.9999% of our lives. But "real" has a very specific meaning that we never think about.

Then consider subatomic particles. You can't feel or see them. But the theories that describe their behavior have gone undefeated for decades. But we'll never be able to see one, so does it exist?

2 more examples: does something exist after it passes the event horizon of a black hole?you can see it, frozen and red shifted. But you can't be guaranteed that if you crossed over that you could touch it. You might get spaghettified and die but there's no way to report this experience to anyone before the event horizon. there's effectively two separate realities.

Next, consider 2 identical marbles mixed up in a box. If you measure both of them before and after shaking, you could still tell them apart because at the macro level, nothing is perfectly identical. One marble will have more protons or defects or higher temperature, etc.

But now try that with 2 atoms or molecules in a box. If you shake it, and discard any measurements on the box like vibration, you absolutely can not tell them apart. They could have disappeared and regenerated for all we know.

My point is that "real" isn't the only concept that leans heavily on language. But also the concept of "same" and for the black hole, even seeing it isn't enough to establish proof that what you're seeing is real. Even though it's the gold standard we constantly rely on. (Not to mention that the very perception of "sight" itself is just subatomic particles hitting a detector! Which is then carried by an EM field to the brain. But I'll stop there).

So update meme: "publish in a major journal or languish"

It led to a video on refraction which seemed to tie it all together and drive home how useful field equations/models are in a practical sense.