Are Particles 'Physical Things' or 'Abstract Ideas'?

[Alex K]

Nice topic. I touch on that in my book in the making, but only to the extent that I raise the question and state that I don't dare try answering it. Quantum field theory (of which some of the people you cite weren't really expert because it was fully developed only later) has a very platonic feel to it. The abstract field is like a stencil from which all the particles of a given type derive their properties. Are Fields real? So many different aspects of them can be observed, they con for example have a constant value everywhere which influences particle masses, for example the condensates of the composite pion field and the Higgs field - they seem real and underlying everything. But they could be just an abstraction - what would be the difference. Isn't the criterion for being real that something presents a given set of phenomena? What is the criterion for reality of your choice, can you elucidate?

Now whether particles are real appears to me to be a silly question since particle is a name given to an empirical phenomenon. Hold your photo plate up, and it goes popp and at one spot you got a hit. Bubble chambers show tracks. If particles aren't real, by the same criteria nothing we usually call reality satisfies the conditions for "real" and we become solipsists.