Comment by amiga386 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by amiga386 | Hacker News Reader

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I'm fairly confident that most mathematics are real, i.e. they have real world analogues. Pi is just an increasingly close look at the ratio between a circle's diameter and circumference.

I'm willing to believe elecromagnetic fields are real - you can see the effects magnets (and electromagnets) have on ferrous material. You can really broadcast electromagnetic waves, induce currents in metals, all that. I'm willing to believe atoms, quarks, electrons, photons, etc. are real. Forces (electrical charge, weak and strong nuclear force, gravity) are real.

What I'm not willing to believe is that quantum fields in general are real, that physical components are not real and don't literally move, they're just "interactions" with and "fluctuations" in the different quantum fields. I refuse to believe that matter doesn't exist and it's merely numbers or vectors arranged a grid. That's a step too far. That's surely just a mathematical abstraction. And yet, the numbers these abstractions produce match so well with physical observations. What's going on?

> I'm willing to believe elecromagnetic fields are real

No shade intended, but a philosophical conversation is unconstructive when it centers around highly ambiguous and undefined words. The word "real" does not actually have a general meaning until you give it a definition in support of your comment. (And surely you will find that if you had a definition, you would not need so much "belief" to back up your argument.)

I was mostly going down a sciencey path, but "real" is a fairly well understood word (part of reality; not imaginary).

In terms of philosophy I'm mostly of an empirical bent. Things which are observable are real, and things which aren't observable directly, but have a observable effect that can be repeatedly demonstrated on demand, are real too (though they may not be exactly as hypothesised if all we can see are their effects). This is how electromagnetism and quantum tunnelling can be real at the same time faeries aren't.

What about the particles that randomly pop in and out of existence?

If one thinks about it, electromagnetism is really bizarre.

How can two electrons actually repel each other? Sure, they do, but it’s practically witchcraft.

Magnetism is even more weird.

> What about the particles that randomly pop in and out of existence?

I like to imagine they're somehow just an observational error, otherwise the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe is real and we get a universe-sized '—All You Zombies—'

> How can two electrons actually repel each other

Indeed. I think it's something we can only intuit, I don't think we've really gotten to the bottom of it. Trying to push two electrons together feels like trying to push a car up a hill, or pressing on springs. The force you fight against is just there and you feel its resistance

Wait until you hear about the gluon, the mediator of the strong force, which is an excitation in the gluon field, and is also the only other particle that is massless and moves at C. However unlike the photon the excitation has a really short range because gluons interact with gluons and form flux tubes between quarks, the further you pull two quarks apart, the more energy you need to use, eventually the energy is so great that it spawns a new quark from the vacuum.

Compared to EM it's just weird as hell and tbh I don't like it.

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