Quantum Physics: what is a particle? (General)

by David Turell , Saturday, February 06, 2021, 19:35 (1384 days ago) @ David Turell

Using electrons and photons as a starting point, n o one knows as of yet:

https://aeon.co/essays/is-everything-made-of-particles-fields-or-both-combined?utm_sour...

"Physicists deftly shift between different pictures of reality as it suits the task at hand. The textbooks are written to teach you how to use the mathematical tools of physics most effectively, not to tell you what things the equations are describing. It takes hard work to distil a story about what’s really happening in nature from the mathematics. This kind of research is considered ‘philosophy of physics’ when done by philosophers and ‘foundations of physics’ when done by physicists.

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"Unfortunately, it’s not immediately clear what replaces the atoms of the periodic table in the standard model. Are the fundamental building blocks of reality quantum particles, quantum fields, or some combination of the two?

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"On 8 August, at the 2019 International Congress on Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science and Technology in Prague, I joined four other philosophers of physics for a debate – tersely titled ‘Particles, Fields, or Both?’ Mathias Frisch of the Leibniz University Hannover opened our session with a presentation of the debate between Einstein and Ritz (see his Aeon essay, ‘Why Things Happen’). Then, the remaining three speakers defended opposing views – updated versions of the positions held by Einstein, Ritz, and Faraday.

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"The part of the standard model that describes electrons and the electromagnetic field is called ‘quantum electrodynamics’, as it is the quantum version of classical electrodynamics. The foundations of the two subjects are closely linked.

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"In my contribution to the debate, I advocated a different point of view on quantum electrodynamics. Following Faraday, I argued that we should get rid of particles and just have fields. However, I don’t think the electromagnetic field alone is enough. We need another field as well: the Dirac field. It is this field that represents the electron (and also the antiparticle of the electron, the positron).

"In classical electrodynamics, this approach replaces the point electron particle with a spread-out lump of energy and charge in the Dirac field. Because the charge is spread out, the electromagnetic field that is produced by this charge will not get infinitely strong at any point in space. That makes the self-interaction problem less severe. But it is not solved. If the electron’s charge is spread out, why don’t the various parts of the electron repel one another so that the electron rapidly explodes? That’s something I’m still working to understand.

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"If you think of electrons as particles, you’ll have to think of photons differently – either eliminating them (Lazarovici’s story) or treating them as a field (Hubert’s story). On the other hand, if you think of electrons as a field, then you can think of photons the same way. I see this consistency as a virtue of the all-fields picture.

"As things stand, the three-sided debate between Einstein, Ritz and Faraday remains unresolved. We’ve certainly made progress, but we don’t have a definitive answer. It is not yet clear what classical and quantum electrodynamics are telling us about reality. Is everything made of particles, fields or both?

"This question is not front and centre in contemporary physics research. Theoretical physicists generally think that we have a good-enough understanding of quantum electrodynamics to be getting on with, and now we need to work on developing new theories and finding ways to test them through experiments and observations.

"That might be the path forward. However, sometimes progress in physics requires first backing up to reexamine, reinterpret and revise the theories that we already have. To do this kind of research, we need scholars who blend the roles of physicist and philosopher, as was done thousands of years ago in Ancient Greece."

Comment: We still don't know the real basis of the reality that was created by......fill in your blank, and most cosmological physicists don't care because the equations work just fine in unexplained ways. It would be nice to know and there might be reasonable explanation instead of so much confusion. The Creator works in very mysterious ways.