I get that it’s values. It’s like, you assign a value to every point in space. But what “is” the electron field? It’s… what? I mean like a Kantian “field an sich”. Is the electron field the amount of electron-ness at a given point in space? What does that even mean beyond a calculation?
Are fields “real entities” with an objective physical reality? Or are they just mathematical abstractions that we use for calculation? Can you talk about fields without math? Does that even make sense? Like, I can talk about electrons without math. I can say they’re point particles that carry charge. But can you talk about the electron field outside of math? Or the EM field? Does it genuinely exist outside of an Electrodynamics calculation?
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What are waves on the ocean made of?
It isn’t water – the molecules of water that are in waves kind of scurry back and forth/up and down, while the shape of a wave can move hundreds (even thousands) of miles without stopping or slowing down. If you were to dump a cup of dye into a wave while on a boat, that dye doesn’t get stuck in a wave to be carried hundreds of miles, but rather the dye disperses locally, roughly outward from where it was dropped. Waves that start in the middle of the Pacific don’t carry those same water molecules from Hawaii to Japan, but the shape/energy of the wave can travel that far. When a boat hits a wave, it doesn’t get “stuck” in the wave, to be carried hundreds of miles, but rather a boat can bob up or down as the waves go on beneath them.
Fields are the waves – in this case, we can visually see the value (height) of the wave going up or down on the surface of the water, it uses water as the carrier medium, but the wave itself is more like the energy that is being carried through the water, not the water itself.
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