A Dissolution of the Problem of Locality

Abstract

Debates over the significance of the particle concept, and the problem of locality-how do we represent localized phenomena?-appear to presuppose that particles and observed phenomena are things rather than events. Well-known theorems (Hergerfelt, Reeh-Schlieder), and a recent variant of Hergerfelt's theorem due to David Malement, present a problem of locality only given the tacit appeal to the concept of thing, in fact an individual, in a sense contrary to particle indistinguishability. There is no difficulty with the particle concept per se, but it is a global construction more than one step removed from events actually observed, which are represented by local integrals over self-adjoint field densities.