There are no particles, there are only fields

By Art Hobson. 2012

157 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Quantum foundations are still unsettled, with mixed effects on science and society. By now it should be possible to obtain consensus on at least one issue: Are the fundamental constituents fields or particles? As this paper shows, experiment and theory imply that unbounded fields, not bounded particles, are fundamental. This is especially clear for relativistic systems, implying that it's also true of nonrelativistic systems. Particles are epiphenomena arising from fields. Thus, the Schrodinger field is a space-filling physical field whose value at any spatial point is the probability amplitude for an interaction to occur at that point. The field for an electron is the electron; each electron extends over both slits in the two-slit experiment and spreads over the entire pattern; and quantum physics is about interactions of microscopic systems with the macroscopic world rather than just about measurements. It's important to clarify this issue because textbooks still teach a particles- and measurement-orien...

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Physiology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/283fd814212bc98b6842fdf7c452166b0df2929f