What if every electron in the universe were the same electron?
John Wheeler really proposed this idea. It was imaginative, but it did not become an accepted model of the universe.
Every electron has the same mass and electric charge as every other electron. Wheeler wondered whether they could all be different appearances of one electron traveling back and forth through spacetime.
Feynman recalled their telephone conversation in his Nobel lecture. In this picture, backward-in-time portions of the electron’s path correspond to positrons. One objection was that we do not observe as many positrons as electrons.
Imagine one thread passing through a sheet of paper many times. On the sheet you see many separate points, although they belong to one thread. This is only an analogy to illustrate the idea.
Even an idea that is not adopted can pose a useful question: why are electrons so identical?
This is Wheeler’s historical, speculative idea, not a demonstrated fact. The indistinguishability of electrons does not imply that only one exists.