Not necessarily their purpose. Just what is happening that is creating the force and how does this force interact between fields?
For example, I get how heat transfer works. Conduction and convection make sense to me because two pieces of matter interact with each other and transfer energy. Cool.
I know it’s not a particle so I guess it’s a wave? A wave of what?
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> Conduction and convection make sense to me because two pieces of matter interact with each other and transfer energy. Cool.
But they interact through precisely the same means as magnetic interaction does.
Your mistake is in thinking of particles as something separate from forces, and in thinking of “interaction” as “touching”. These concepts don’t really make sense at the scale of subatomic particles.
In quantum mechanics, a “particle” is just a “bump” in the physical fields that make up reality. If the fields are an ocean, the particles are the waves in that ocean: made from it and fundamentally tied to it in an inextricable way. From that perspective, it’s not odd at all that two particles interact through a field, because it’s actually just the field itself evolving (because the particles themselves are made from and are part of the field itself). It doesn’t even make sense to talk about a wave separately from the ocean in which it exists, because the properties of the wave *are* the properties of the water in a particular configuration.
Moreover, particles aren’t points. When you think about conduction or convection, you’re probably picturing a bunch of little marbles bumping into each other. But in the full treatment, every particle is a smeared-out “blob” that extends out to infinity (or at least, very far, depending on how you mix QM and relativity). The particles in my body are, in that sense, currently “touching” the particles in yours, in the sense that the smeared-out-blobs of me overlap with the smeared-out-blobs of you. As particles get closer, this overlap grows, but there’s no sharp boundary. There’s no notion of touching: just of greater or lesser overlap. And when they interact, they interact *because their underlying representations in physical fields happen to overlap*.
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