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Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

Electrons are a perfectly adequate model for reality. I do not read the previous poster as disputing this point.

Instead, they appear to be asking, “is there another model for reality which would also work well enough to build a MOSFET?”

I do not know either.

That said, people keep telling me that both QM and GR are known to be incomplete, so perhaps electrons are no more real than phlogiston? I would certainly be surprised, but that’s besides the point, and even if someone is currently rolling their eyes and preparing to explain why I am wrong and electrons can’t possibly be “like phlogiston” (not a position I actually hold so don’t waste your time), an alien civilisation could make an analogous mistake and fill the electron-shaped gap in their physics model with something completely different analogous to the way phlogiston filled the oxygen-shaped gap in chemistry.

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The good thing is, it does not matter. It is entirely possible the electrons are not "real" -- so what? The electric field is not "real" either (in the sense that there is no corresponding physical object), and the magnetic field is even less "real", it is just a change in electric field.

As long as there is predictive power, we can use a theory. And once we discover there are unpredicted cases, we can update the theory.

In particular, the reason phlogiston theory was discarded was not some philosophical reasons -- it was because it made bad predictions (specifically, that things always lose mass when burned).

There is a beautiful exercise in where you take two very basic physics rules (electrostatic force between two individual charged particles and speed of light equation), and derive basically entire electromagnetic theory from it. Really drives the point that underlying physics is simple, and most of the formulas, especially introductory ones, are just shortcuts to make reasoning and computation easier.

In my vague understanding, you can consider objects like electrons as either particles or as amplitudes in a field. Although these two (currently known) ways of viewing it lead for the most part to similar intuitions, these paradigms can be somewhat misleading.

For example, the fact that we viewed elementary particles as particles, analogous to macro physical objects, for so long meant it was hard to get a grip on wave-particle duality of light and quantum teleportation. In normal life, small particle-like objects don't tend to pop in and out of existence or move around spontaneously. But in many ways, electrons do in fact behave as discrete particles.

Physical realists, like most of us on the board probably, don't dispute there is a single physical reality (possible multiverses aside). However there are multiple theories and models that can describe the same reality. These models tend to have different strengths and weaknesses. So we do not know how many possible ways of looking at these things there are, and to what extent aliens might see them similarly or differently.

I completely agree, but if they are able to properly (as in with predictive power for variations) build a MOSFET or anything of similar complexity they would likely be able to understand our concept of an electron.

I believe that is very unlikely as it is very unlikely to miss atoms and then it is very likely to miss electrons. Of course I also do not think that it is provably impossible.

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