B Does a field with 0 value "exist"?

[black hole 123]

this has bugged me for quite a while. i was listen to chalmers talk about consciousness and making comparison consciousness to the field generated by a mass/charged particle. i know this is slightly philosophical question, but does a field with uniformly 0 value exist in the sense we mean tree/people exist? the problem is, if you say in a room with no charges, a EM field will 0 value exists in that room, then i can just postulate an infinity of other fields existing but they just have 0 value. if you say it doesn't exist, then that sort of implies EM fields with non 0 value don't exist either.

sorry if this sounds philosophical, i know the rules of this forum very well i don't have any bad intentions, I am just stumped by this thing.

 

[Dale]

I tend to think of the field as existing everywhere and just having a value of 0 in some locations. But to be honest I cannot see what difference it could possibly make.

 

[Ibix]

if u say in a room with no charges, a EM field will 0 value exists in that room, then i can just postulate an infinity of other fields existing but they just have 0 value.

So what? If they don't do anything then what's the point of speculating about whether or not they exist? This is the point of applying parsimony in scientific theory. If you add something to a theory and it doesn't change the predictions, someone else is going to take it back out because the simpler theory does the job.

The only question is whether having a field that's sometimes there and sometimes not is a more parsimonious concept than a field that's always there but sometimes zero. Like Dale I tend to the latter interpretation, but I've certainly used language that implies the former. Unless you can construct a theory that makes different predictions in the two cases, it isn't a question with a scientific answer.

 

[A.T.]

... i can just postulate an infinity of other fields existing but they just have 0 value...

Sure, have a field day with that.

 

[Vanadium 50]

Sure, have a field day with that.

That sure came out of left field.

 

[berkeman]

LOL

 

[hilbert2]

If there's a field that always has the same value at any point in spacetime, it could just as well be modeled as a constant source term in the field equations of anything it interacts with. If it can have some other value that can be measured, then it should be regarded as an actual field.