A very smart guy named Alfred Korzybski said, “The map is not the territory.” It’s important to not get too hung up on epistemological implications of our model

A very smart guy named Alfred Korzybski said, “The map is not the territory.” It’s important to not get too hung up on epistemological implications of our models of reality, because they are just models. On a practical level a field is something which has a value at every point, that value can be a scalar, vector, or tensor depending on the nature of the field. For some good discussion I think this could help: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/13157/what-is-a-field-really https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/13157/what-is-a-... Now, it is very easy to get hung up on this "Is it real or not" thing, and most people do for at least a while, but please just put it aside. When you peer really hard into the depth of the theory, it turns out that it is hard to say for sure that stuff is "stuff". It is tempting to suggest that having a non-zero value of mass defines "stuffness", but then how do you deal with the photo-electric effect (which makes a pretty good argument that light comes in packets that have enough "stuffness" to bounce electrons around)? All the properties that you associate with stuff are actually explainable in terms of electro-magnetic fields and mass (which in GR is described by a component of a tensor field!). And round and round we go. Light doesn’t propagate in empty space, because space isn’t empty, it’s permeated with quantum fields in constant flux. What light doesn’t require is a medium, and a field is not a medium. The problem here is that these theories are really described in terms of a bunch of math, and when we use words to describe those theories, something is lost in translation. There are no words that fully capture what a field is in QFT, you must use math. Once you adopt that perspective, inflation would just be the result of another field with particular properties (esp. a given range of potential energy curves). Of course, inflation is an untested theory, and there are competing ones which try to explain the apparent homogeneity and isotropy of the universe. Inflation is probably the most popular, but it doesn’t rest on the kind of firm foundation that QED does.