what is an electric field made of?

[Leo_Bloom]

@Chronos

So if virtual particles don’t really exist, but all detected particles are virtual, then we never actually detect anything that really exists.

Paging Mr. Plato, thinking in his Cave.

[cmyk]

@Half_Man_Half_Wit

I think one can adopt the view that the whole particle vs. field thing in QFT is just the wave/particle dichotomy of quantum mechanics iterated once over: the quantum ‘field’ simply has both discrete and continuous aspects, the former of which one would associate with particles, while the latter are usually thought of as characteristic of fields. But neither reading need be anymore correct then the wave- or particle-reading of quantum mechanics: we’re not dealing with objects classical intuition applies to.

This may seem somewhat unsatisfactory in terms of getting answers to the fundamental questions, but it’s easy to see that something’s gotta give: if the ordinary stuff our world is made of can be explained in terms of more fundamental, but equally ordinary stuff, then we stand before the question of what this more fundamental stuff is made of, and can continue this iteration all the way down the rabbit hole. If, on the other hand, there is to be some stuff that just is, something that artificially anchors the regression, then questions regarding the origin or composition of that stuff seem to be unanswerable, which I’d think is similarly dissatisfying.

So we must, if we expect for answers to exist, eventually come to fundamentally different kind of stuff, to which our ordinary concepts don’t quite apply. It’s similar to the problem of where life came from: if the ancestor of every living thing is a living thing, then either the chain of living things stretches back infinitely far into the past, or there must be some first living thing that popped up by magic. But this problem is just a problem of human categorization: ‘living thing’ is not an as sharply defined category as one might first think. Life can gradually develop from non-life, over a series of intermediary stages that don’t quite belong to either category. Perhaps it’s the same with the stuff that exists, or that stuff is composed of; perhaps the question of whether something exists is of a similarly ambiguous nature as the question of whether something is alive, in certain circumstances.

Very well written and thought provoking. Thanks!

[Hari_Seldon]

After 41 more-or-less serious replies, I think I can safely give the first answer that occurred to me when I read the question:

An electric field is made up of electric grass for electric sheep to graze on so that androids can dream of them.

[user_hostile]

@Hari_Seldon

After 41 more-or-less serious replies, I think I can safely give the first answer that occurred to me when I read the question:

An electric field is made up of electric grass for electric sheep to graze on so that androids can dream of them.

Or sing.