How to distinguish between indistinguishable particles

Abstract

A long and intense debate in philosophy is concerned with the question whether there can be haecceistic differences between possible worlds, that is, nonqualitative differences that only arise from different de re representations. According to haecceitism, it can give rise to a different situation if the positions of two qualitatively identical particles are exchanged, while according to anti-haecceitism, this is not the case. It has been suggested that classical statistical mechanics might provide evidence for one of these positions. However, most philosophers of physics argue that it does not. In this article, we show that order-preserving dynamics, a novel method from statistical mechanics developed for the description of nonergodic systems, changes this situation: It is intrinsically haecceistic and makes different experimental predictions than non-haecceistic alternatives. Thereby, it provides an empirical argument for the existence of modality de re.

arXiv commentForthcoming in "The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science"

References in corpus (16)

• Dynamic Density Functional Theory of Fluids
• Langevin Equation for the Density of a System of Interacting Langevin Processes
• Dynamical density functional theory and its application to spinodal decomposition
• Classical dynamical density functional theory: from fundamentals to applications
• Effects of social distancing and isolation on epidemic spreading: a dynamical density functional theory model
• Colloidal crystal growth at externally imposed nucleation clusters
• Dynamical density functional theory for dense atomic liquids
• Dynamical density functional theory for colloidal particles with arbitrary shape
• Active Brownian particles at interfaces: An effective equilibrium approach
• Particle Conservation in Dynamical Density Functional Theory
• The Gibbs Paradox
• The Five Problems of Irreversibility
• The Mereology of Thermodynamic Equilibrium
• Order-preserving dynamics in one dimension -- single-file diffusion and caging from the perspective of dynamical density functional theory
• Particle-conserving dynamics on the single-particle level
• Essentially Ergodic Behaviour

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Perspective: New directions in dynamical density functional theory
• Understanding probability and irreversibility in the Mori-Zwanzig projection operator formalism