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The people that I tend to respect most in these areas tell me that (at least in fundamental physics/particle physics) fields are reality, and that it's our perc
by Steuard 11y ago
The people that I tend to respect most in these areas tell me that (at least in fundamental physics/particle physics) fields are reality, and that it's our perceptions of particle behavior that are an illusion. (Just for example, an accelerating observer will count a different particle density than an inertial observer for the same underlying field state: that's known as the Unruh effect.) So at its deepest level, reality appears to obey the rules of field theory: the fields themselves are the fabric of the universe.
In condensed matter physics (and thus in most familiar many-particle systems), I tend to give the opposite answer. Field theory is a great tool for describing or approximating many condensed matter systems, but my sense is that it's less fundamental there. But that's also less my area of expertise.
- rndn 11y agoI'm just an physics enthusiast and my knowledge is solely based on popular literature, but it seems to me that either (1) the mechanistic, computational, discrete view is the foundation and everything that appears continuous and field-like comes just from averaging over myriads of particle interactions, or (2) real-valued fields are the foundation and discrete structures appear at certain thresholds. In some sense the former possibility appears to be safer, because in the latter case we could just find ourselves in some meta-stable configuration, where some parameter of our universe could be sweeping through the parameter space in an unfortunate way, such that the threshold for matter to exist might get out of reach and everything could easily dissolve into a different structure.
- cma 11y ago> averaging over myriads of particle interactions But you can have partial wave collapse through things like lack of particle observations https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renninger_negative-result_experiment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renninger_negative-result_ex...