Interesting, I always thought of fields as the interface to measure underlying particles interactions instead of the "base thing" itself. My reasoning was that

Interesting, I always thought of fields as the interface to measure underlying particles interactions instead of the "base thing" itself. My reasoning was that since it was impossible to model effects from individual particles behavior, we were modeling the aggregate effect using fields, but underneath it was just "small objects" interactions. Edit: reading the rest of the guide, I find it very enlightening and at the perfect level of complexity perfect for me (no formal maths since Uni 15 years ago).