indistinguishability
nounEtymology From in- + distinguishability or indistinguishable + -ity.
1
The state of being indistinguishable.
- Supposing, for example, that in carrjing our eye along a log of wood, and a piece of stone^ we find the troublof moving the eye (which, though small, is perceptible) to be neither greater nor less in the one case than in the other, these two efforts will e then be indistinguishable to us ; and if we find many cases of such indistinguishability, we shall want a word to express the idea ; we shall call it equality.1872, The Quarterly Review, John Murray, pages 99-100:
- At times Air Force and CAS efforts blended to the point of indistinguishability.1991, Earl H. Tilford Jnr, Setup: what the Air Force did in Vietnam and why:
1 more example
- 1996 Bose-Einstein Condensation: An Introduction But due to the indistinguishability of the particles in the sample, it describes a decay mechanism that occurs for all N atoms simultaneously.
- Related terms
- indistinguishable