Auston Louis said:
why I believe that two atoms, one that will decay within the next hour and one that will decay in more than 5,000 years are not identical.
I'm surprised we are discussing this, since this is pretty clearly a personal theory and we don't discuss that topic here. Especially in this thread, since physics as it is understood and practiced has a different answer. We wouldn't answer a question with "phlogiston" or "caloric" would we? I'm also surprised that someone who states he is a physicist would propose such a thing.
Everyone else is discussing Bell. This is a fine argument, but I think there are better ones.
As you've described it, radioactive nuclei "wear out" over time. This wearing out (experimentally) is exponential, with the same constant independent of sample and environment.
This leads to a number of questions:
- Why do some nuclei decay immediately after production? (The most probable lifetime in an exponential is zero) - why is the initial resistance to wear distributed in a fashion that appears to be random and exponential. In short, all you have done is move the question of randomness up one level so you haven't gained anything but one more question. (Why exponential)
- Why are nuclear half-lives the same for the same species of nucleus produced at different times, different places or by different mechanisms?
- Why can't we accelerate or retard this wear?
So I would say you answered one question by pushing it back a level and adding three more questions. You argued that your theory was superior "philosophically". I think I demonstrated it isn't. The only "philosophical" improvement seems to be that you like it better. I maintain that nature is the way it is whether or not anyone of us likes it.
But there is an even bigger problem, and that's thermodynamics. You are arguing that radioactive atoms are distinguishable. If that were true, we would have the Gibbs paradox and could use it to construct perpetual motion machines. We would not have Bose-Einstein or Fermi-Dirac statistics, at least not in atoms. Even if we didn't understand - or even observe - radioactive decay, we could tell that this theory is not right, because it leads to a very different thermodynamics than we observe.
