There's certainly plenty of common misunderstanding in this, uh, field!
Really? Wave packets that are indivisible energy blobs, and that make individual "clicks" on my detector sure seem to act like particles to me.
I get that the math implies these bundles are waves - that's the duality part. I don't think any physicist thinks that there is a "particle" embedded in the wave packet, though, like this guy is arguing - the quantized wave packet is the particle!
Hence, a question like “are fields real?” is besides the point: it is impossible to tell whether that theory is wrong or qualify how wrong it is, because the reference point is never available. It’s a model—it works for some purposes, it doesn’t for others.
What do you mean?
I hope primary school educators are moving past the atomic model, first to subatomic then to quantum fields (even just a hand wavey introduction with no maths)
People hold onto the underlying paradigm they are first taught for an awfully long time even if they logically know better
Until they don't.
Ultimately what is real is a philosophical question. Why isn't man-bear pig real? The Imagination Land story arc really delved into this question.
My latest check of QFT is that there are 37 fields.
This leads me to believe:
- There is only 1 undiscovered fundamental field
- There are multiple gods and each complains about there being too many fields and how much simpler universe management would be if there was just 1 field and then https://xkcd.com/927
Is this mostly settled then? And if so why do we continue to teach a bewildering model?
“Are fields real?” is not a bad question! It can’t be answered within the framing of scientific method, but it brings into focus the bigger question of what “being real” might mean.
I’d rather prefer a Unix way: a plurality of explicitly more limited but more numerous and conceptually diverse models.
Quantum field are too weird and without math they are just weird magic. Let kids play with balls until they are big enough to be enlighted.
> People hold onto the underlying paradigm they are first taught for an awfully long time even if they logically know better.
I agree with that, but I don't know how to fix that.
I don’t see why your approach is not subject to the same limitations.
Particles aren't?
It’s one of the points I disagreed with him on (his line between “exists” and “not exists” seems arbitrary, like he is forcing a particular layer of abstraction), and it somewhat undermined his bigger argument about the nature of the self in Reasons and Persons.
In some ways, France is more real than people comprising it. In almost every way, a chair is more real than particles or fields that it can be modeled as.
That probably just means our theory of physics (that only explains 4% of the observable universe) is wrong.
Beercrashion: the tendency of some specific wooden structures to serve a peripheral function to some creatures as a comfortable buffer between them and the surface beneath them often called ground.