Originally posted by wolram
hi marcus, what is your view on a higgs field without a higgs particle
or even a photon fields without a photon? or even that all events are ineractions of fields and subatomic particles are condensates of said fields, hope you can follow my ranting.
you are asking a very personal question
about some things it may be better to try to talk the way other people talk and keep one's personal views to oneself
rushing in where angels fear to tread, as usual, I really like thinking of the fields as the basic objects of which any theory is built and "photons" as just twangs or excitations of one of the fields
I don't think the world is built up out of this-ons and that-ons like some nifty varieties of marbles.
To speak of "gravitons" is to adopt an approximation of gravity in flat Minkowski space (special rel) that is unrealistic. I don't think of gravity as built up out of "gravitons" in a flat Minkowski space but as dynamic geometry.
But one must immediately say that the approximations are excellent! So perhaps we should always speak in terms of photons! This helps to remind us that the excitations are quantized into little bundles of energy E and angular frequency w where, miraculously, E is always equal to hbar times w.
One more thing. It doesn't ultimately matter too much how I think of things as long as I can calculate predictions that match reality.
So, for example, in natural units the temp at surface of the sun is 40.8E-30. So I multiply by 2.701 and get 110 and I tell you that
the frequency of the average sunlight photon is 110E-30
in Planck units of frequency and the energy of the average sunlight photon is 110E-30 Planck energy units and the angular wavelength of it is (1/110)E30 times the Planck length.
And if you convert these to metric it will turn out that's
compatible with the handbook data---it matches the real world.
(2.701 is a mathematical constant like pi which one uses with Planck's black body radiation law) In that sense, what matters is not how I think about photons but whether the numbers match up.
Now you see I am ranting

and you hardly did at all!