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.
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?
