It’s important to note that the concept of a field cannot be broken down into something which has a material or mechanical analogy. Sometimes, physicists think of a field as the aggregate effect of exchange or virtual particles which are governed by a quantum field theory, or the effect of the curvature of space time, but it’s important to note... See more

The world of quantum mechanics and quantum field theory introduce a different conception of what things are though. It turns out that elementary particles can’t be thought of as individual ‘things’ which have a volume. In fact, if particles did have a volume, physics wouldn’t work! We would end up with "surfaces" of electrons behaving in an... See more

“ To see the beauty of the Maxwell theory it is necessary to move away from mechanical models and into the abstract world of fields. To see the beauty of quantum mechanics it is necessary to move away from verbal descriptions and into the abstract world of geometry. Mathematics is the language that nature speaks. The language of mathematics makes

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