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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Fields are pretty much the bedrock of the universe. If the universe is “made” of anything, it’s fields and spacetime. One way you can think of them is as a fluid that suffuses the entire universe. All the fields are everywhere.
When you keep asking the question of what something is made of you get smaller and smaller until you reach an elementary particle, like the electron or quarks.
These particles are the result of energy disturbing the field responsible for that particle. So if you have energy in the electron field, it produces an electron at the location of the energy.
You’ve probably heard that energy can’t be destroyed, but what does that mean? If you take an electron and a positron (anti-matter electron equivalent) and push them together then they annihilate each other and disappear with a burst of light(which is made of photons).
This is because you took two disturbances in the electron field with opposite charge and put them in the same place which pushed the energy they were made of out of the electron field and into the electromagnetic field which created the photons you saw appear when the electron and positron vanished.
So the energy that was the electron and positron got converted into photons because you changed the field that the energy was in.
Put simply fields are where particles come from, and to make particles you need to put energy into the relevant field.
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