Felix wrote:Here's an an interesting thread on quora.com re: the reality of electrons: http://ow.ly/ZzMl30aQM6c
Thanks Felix, that is super!
-- Updated April 14th, 2017, 5:06 am to add the following --
A Poster He or I wrote:I notice, Belindi, that no one has attempted a direct answer of your OP's last question, "But multiple electrons aren't different aspects of the same are they?" I'm in agreement with Felix that we are ultimately just talking about mathematical constructs here, but I freely acknowledge that the effects of what we call electricity are a very real part of our empirical experience, and that the "electromagnetic field" is our best model of electricity, and that the "players" on that field are these troublesome electron thingies.I think you are saying, A Poster He or I, that whether electrons are real or not is about which aspect we view then from, or to put this another way which question we ask. So electrons exist as units in a field and the field also exists, and that those are complementary.
The thing about fields in physics, unlike those in football stadiums, is that they exist in complementarity with their particle "players." There is no field without the presence of the particles, while the behavior of the players is only understandable in terms of the field they produce. In other words, the mere idea of an individual electron is merely a convenient (or more likely obfuscating) extrapolation of the Pauli exclusion principle. There is circumstantial evidence that all of space and time are merely an emergent epiphenomenon of something much more fundamental (I'm referring here to the consequences of the empirical proofs of Bell's Inequality). So our fundamental concepts of extension and duration are in some sense unreal. The would bode well for an opinion that all electrons are the "same" electron.