Recent content by dm4b

Since you took what I said and quoted it out of the context it was written in, I'm not surprised by your confusion. But, I believe this will be my last post at physicsforums regardless, as I see no reason to post here anymore. This was a waste of my time as usual, and always seems to be...

I already specified in a post above.

Seriously guys, don't you find this kind of childish? The Velveteen Rabbit? A reply solely to put up no less than 10 emoticons? Is this the kind of discussion physicsforums likes to promote? The ontic nature of fields is a serious physics question. Why this forum seems to feel threatened in...

No, our theories are an appearance. Take Newtonian Physics. Pretty much everything there relies on the assumption of absolute spacetime. But, absolute spacetime does not exist anywhere in reality any more than a perfect circle does. In other words, Newtonian Physics is an approximation to...

Look at the way I phrased the title to the OP, with a question mark. Once again, what you are saying is my whole point. I here folks loosely speak of how fields are "physical" or how they are "fundamental". What I'm saying is if fields are un-observable those terms become even slipperier than...

That's kind of what I was getting at. I would like to equate physical with observable, but ... like I said in my other post just prior to this one, how can we know if something is "real" if it's impossible in principle to observe? Or, are there some things empirical science can't answer?

Well, if it's un-observable in principle, by which I mean one can never, ever, observe it, regardless of technological know-how, how can one ever verify if it is un-physical, or not, for sure? How can one ever know if we're just engaging in mathematical masturbation (as Feynman liked to put...

You are missing something. The ontic status of a quantum field, which is what I was after (as much as is currently possible, anyhow) I was looking more for scientific facts, rather than opinions, or what folks "think" a field is. If we don't have the facts yet, that's fine (in which case I...

I guess my next question would be ... if fields are indeed un-observable and non-physical, it seems like we can't say they are (more) fundamental, can we? This seems to make fields more akin to a convenient calculational model used to make predictions for (physical) things we really can...

I've read that and been involved in the discussion. Damn good argument, but I didn't think it was %100 air tight, either. However, could the same thing be said about the unobservable fields in question?

I can't help but wonder if we're getting into "virtual particles" here, or the virtual bosons involved in intermediating the force and found in the propagator, which are not directly observable, or cannot be measured.

That was my initial thought! Operators that reproduce the original state multiplied by an eigenvalue are observable with the eigenvalue being related to the probability of obtaining a particular eigenstate upon measurement. Fields are operator-valued fields. These kinds of operators don't...

I'm currently working through Robert Klauber's Student Friendly Quantum Field Theory, which by the way is much more accessible than other texts like, say, Peskin and Schroeder, for others also coming into QFT via the self-study path. Anyhow, he mentioned something that never really clicked...

Do you guys not realize how anthropocentric your replies are? Again, this is only reinforcing my original point. Light doesn't care about any of this, or what we're capable of asking, understanding, defining, measuring, or about any other human based activity. Also, it's not just a question...

You're only reinforcing my point. Light did what it does, long before we arrived on the scene and started asking "what we mean when we ask whether 'c changes'"