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Comment by _factor | Hacker News Reader

I’ve always wondered if the electrons bound to a nucleus are somehow bound to the element they were attached to.

Changing an element from Hydrogen to Helium or any other variant of conversion seems like it breaks an especially solid confluence. Each proton determines the atomic number, and there is a corresponding electron for each proton after all.

They may float around the universe, but could they still “belong” to the element they were formed with, bound to be impacted in some way when that element converts to another (in a stellar reactor for example).

This would mean electrons are somehow unique most likely, but stranger things have been observed.

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I'm not sure exactly what your imagining, but there are two principles that are related to your idea.

1. Particles are indistinguishable from each other. It's a very deep principle, i.e. a lot of stuff relies on this being true.

2. States and particles can absolutely be entangled ("bound") to each other, but it tends to be pretty fragile.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indistinguishable_particles

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement

To be fair, what he proposed isn't (immediately obviously) mutually exclusive with your points. If it were true it would be almost impossible to detect experimentally.

So it gets tossed on the stack with all the other complex-and-unfalsifiable theories for which no evidence exists.

It might make for an amusing sci-fi plot though.

> To be fair, what he proposed isn't (immediately obviously) mutually exclusive with your points. If it were true it would be almost impossible to detect experimentally.

The obviousness or lack thereof is subjective, but the exclusivity is firmly established. The absolute indistinguishability of particles is deeply woven into quantum mechanics; you don't get a Pauli exclusion principle without it, for example. If the particles remembered their previous lives, and an electron that used to be tied to an iron nucleus weren't completely identical to one that used to be stuck to a carbon nucleus, all of quantum mechanics as we know it would be impossible.

I don't see why? They could be indistinguishable from our perspective while mysteriously being affected in some way if certain things happened to their "partner". We can experimentally set an upper bound on the permissible weirdness but I don't think we can eliminate the possibility.

Experimentally you'd be attempting to detect inexplicable single particle events above some level of rarity. You'd have access to only one side of the pair - you can't tell which one the other side is even if it's right in front of you (and it almost certainly isn't). So there's no discernible (to you) trigger for these events you're trying to detect. So you'd be trying to correlate frequency counts with bulk conditions as averaged across more or less the entire universe.

In the same vein as the God of the gaps the phenomenon could always be hiding below the noise floor.

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