What are the most fundamental entities in the SM and QFT?

[Loulougaga]

TL;DR

Question on how the standard model link information and particle like behavior.

What are the most fundamentals entities in the SM and QFT?
Is information or particle first?
What if information preceed particles?

 

[PeterDonis]

What are the most fundamentals entities in the SM and QFT?

Quantum fields.

Is information or particle first?

Neither. Quantum fields are first.

What if information preceed particles?

See above.

 

[weirdoguy]

What is "information"?

 

[pines-demon]

OP needs to read: How to Better Define Information in Physics

 

[ChrisF]

TL;DR: Question on how the standard model link information and particle like behavior.

What are the most fundamentals entities in the SM and QFT?
Is information or particle first?
What if information preceed particles?

Re: Information or Particle First?

Good question — and the answer the Standard Model actually gives might surprise you.

In QFT, neither information nor particles are the most fundamental entities. Quantum fields are. Particles are not objects — they are excitations of underlying fields. An electron is not a thing that exists; it is a mode of the
electron field being excited. The field is always there. The particle is what happens when that field is disturbed in a quantized way.

So the hierarchy is already: field → excitation → particle. Particles are downstream.

On information preceding particles:
The "it from bit" idea (Wheeler, Zuse, Fredkin) is compelling philosophically but runs into a hard problem: information is a description of states, not a generator of them. If information precedes particles, what substrate carries and
constrains that information? You cannot have a bit without something that can be in two distinguishable states — and that something has physical properties.

The more productive question may not be "information or particle first?" but rather: what determines which modes are allowed?

In QFT the vacuum is not empty — it has structure. The permittivity (ε₀) and permeability (μ₀) of the vacuum define how fields propagate through it. Those two measured quantities determine the speed of light, the impedance of free
space, and ultimately constrain which standing wave configurations are stable enough to manifest as particles. Particle identity — mass, charge, spin — may be less about "information" and more about which wave geometries the vacuum
permits to be phase-stable.

If you're interested in that direction, wave mechanics frameworks that derive particle properties from vacuum geometry rather than postulating them are worth a look. The question "why does the electron have this mass and not another?"
has a geometric answer, not an information-theoretic one.

What specifically are you exploring — the interpretation side or the mathematical structure?

Christian Fuccillo

 

[weirdoguy]

The permittivity (ε₀) and permeability (μ₀) of the vacuum define how fields propagate through it.

How, if they don't exist in other than SI systems of units?

 

[ChrisF]

How, if they don't exist in other than SI systems of units?

A fair challenge, and worth being precise about.

In Gaussian or natural units ε₀ and μ₀ don't appear explicitly — they are absorbed into c and the impedance of free space Z₀. But the physical content they represent doesn't disappear with the unit choice. The vacuum still has a
propagation speed c = 1/√(ε₀μ₀) and a characteristic impedance Z₀ = √(μ₀/ε₀). Those are invariant physical relationships in every unit system — the constants just get written differently.

You can set c = 1 in natural units, or absorb ε₀ into Coulomb's constant, but you cannot set both ε₀ and μ₀ independently to 1 without fixing c — which means the vacuum's electromagnetic character is always present in your equations,
just sometimes less visibly.

The physical statement is that the vacuum has measurable propagation properties. Whether you call them ε₀ and μ₀ or fold them into c and Z₀ is a notation choice. The properties themselves are unit-system independent.