Particles vs Fields: What's More Fundamental?

[chroot]

I applaud for your interest in picking up physics as a hobby, LostInSpaceTime, but I have to warn you: the two books you've mentioned: The Big Bang Never Happened and The Tao of Physics are terrible, terrible books. They are effectively works of socially-acceptable crackpottery. I strongly advise you to steer clear of these kinds of books, and focus on reputable, mainstream works instead.

You might find some of the following books interesting:

The Particle Universe
The Feynman Lectures
A Tour of the Calculus

- Warren

 

[dreynaud]

Particle or field ?

One would be very prudent before giving any answer since the history of physics

Wave or point like object ? Cophenague interpretation says that they are complementary aspect of the reality (the particle).

The QFT generally gives rise to uncertainty relation between phase and number of particle (if I remember well, this was fisrt established by Bohr and Heisenberg (or Rosenfled) in the framwork of QFT; see also Feynman who explain this in his classical books).

The interpretation of this relation is the following : if you measure precisely the phase of a field, you can't measure simultaneously the number of particle of the field. Bohr's complementarity principle apply here. So that field aspect and particle aspect are two aspect of one thing : the "quantum field".

So I would vote a third propostion : "Quantum field".

(Note that a vote won't help : the scientific method doesn't incorporate such a method to invalidate a theory !).