Quanta and Fields

We should always admit that we don’t know everything but not be so cautious that we don’t want to admit when we do know things. We know the particles we are made of, and the forces by which we interact. That’s one of the greatest accomplishments in the history of humankind. We can be a little bit proud.

This choice will come into play when we start talking about quantum fields and virtual particles, whose status also raises tricky philosophical questions. For our purposes, it is the wave function that represents reality, and all of our talk of “particles” and “fields” is a useful language for thinking about that reality in relatively intuitive terms. If your favorite formulation of quantum mechanics prefers different ways of talking, you are welcome to translate into whatever language you are comfortable with.