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Comment by nilkn | Hacker News Reader

The conventional answer is that all electrons are the same because they are all local excited states of a single quantized field (the electron field). So we just have to shift perspective from "there's only one electron" to "there's only one electron field".

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That's about as useful as "there is only one complex plane no matter how many regions and functions we work with".

No, it’s a legitimate answer to why all electrons have the same properties. This is the real answer according to our best modern theories of particle physics. It explains why all elementary particles appear to have fixed sets of properties.

If its possible, can you explain please why electron only? What about other particles?

All particles are like that.

Then why article is about electron only?

What's true about all particles is also true about electron. There's also the myth that not all particles are equal.

Maybe I don't follow the consequence of your statement, but isn't the photon quite different from an electron? It has no mass & has no anti particle that we can identify. It's also an elementary particle that doesn't get combined like quarks to make the proton

That's the myth I refer to. Antiphoton exists, it's just symmetric enough and the same as photon.

It isn't.

> Electrons, like other elementary particles, are indistinguishable from each other.

They are the same article.

No it's more like saying it's all just different regions of a single function. Individual electrons are just regions of that function that have particular recurring kinds of structure to them

But this explanation has nothing to do with fields. It is the idea that all the electrons are literally the same particle.

And that idea is wrong. It was never accepted, not even by Feynman. The field explanation is the one used by the Standard Model. I’m providing the best known real answer for anyone curious after reading the article.

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