Devin Bayer said:
Then why not start coming up with a better language? Seems like you are in the perfect position to ignite such an endeavour. I've been lurking here for a while and it does get annoying to see the same endless arguments over unclear language and the misunderstanding it introduces. Just a suggestion, maybe a kind of moderated wiki of definitions would help.
The only good language is math, and the wave function of a many-body system (btw only very special cases of many-body systems can be described with a single wave function, namely only such, where the particle number is conserved; usually you need quantum field theory) is a function ##\psi(t,\vec{x}_1,\vec{x}_2,\ldots,\vec{x}_N)##, where ##N## is the number of particles. It's meaning is that ##|\psi|^2## is the probability to find simultanaeously a particle at ##\vec{x}_1##, ##\vec{x}_2##, ..., ##\vec{x}_N##. If the particles are indistinguishable, i.e., all their intrinsic quantum numbers (mass, spin, electric charges, lepton and baryon number) are the same, the wave function must also be unchanged or flip its sign whenever two of the particles are interchanged, i.e., ##\psi(t,\vec{x}_1,\ldots,\vec{x}_j,\ldots,\vec{x}_k,\ldots,\vec{x}_N)=\pm \psi(t,\vec{x}_1,\ldots,\vec{x}_k,\ldots,\vec{x}_j,\ldots,\vec{x}_N)##. For the plus-sign you have bosons, for the minus-sign you have fermions. Relativistic QFT as used to formulate the standard model you can show that all particles with integer spin are necessarily bosons and all particles with half-integer spin are fermions.
