On Sun, Oct 25, 2015 at 11:29 PM, David Roberson <dlrober...@aol.com> wrote:
The Pauli exclusion principle appears to be a rule that captures a portion > of a deeper underlying physical phenomena. If what I suspect is true then > one day new particles, etc. will be discovered that do not obey it. Note that there are bosons, which don't obey the Pauli exclusion principle. You can crowd as many photons into a small space as you want, because they obey Bose-Einstein statistics rather than Fermi-Dirac statistics. I recall a derivation in which the only difference between the wavefunctions for bosons and fermions is the presence of a "+" sign or a "-" sign before one of the terms, but I am not yet familiar with the derivation. Note that only certain kinds of particles can be described either by Fermi-Dirac statistics or Bose-Einstein statistics. The particles must be indistinguishable, there must be negligible "interaction" between them. (This latter detail is the hallmark of a simplifying assumption made to make a mathematical model work.) Note also that Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics are yet another way of describing particle interactions. Eric
