In the restaurants of some countries, the maître d’ will seat your party at a table already occupied by strangers if the table has sufficient empty chairs. In other cultures, new diners expect to be seated at empty tables even when occupied tables are surrounded by surplus seats. Elementary particles, and composites made of them, fall analogously into two categories: bosons and fermions. Bosons readily share the same state, analogous to the first group of diners. Fermions prefer solitude, like the second group of diners. This article offers a simple argument for their respective distribution functions that describe how a system of identical particles populates the states available to them.

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