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

[Mudhammam]

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.

Thanks for the reply Alex! Your book sounds very interesting, though I'm willing to bet it will be a bit too technical for me (and are you publishing it in English or German?). Even the notion of "quantum field theory," I might point out, almost seems contradictory! (Zukav writes, "A quantum is an indivisible whole. It is a small piece of something, while a field is a whole area of something.") He also talks about bubble chambers and I'd like to get your take on what he (or Bohm) says, though instead of typing out the entire relevant pages I'll just instead take a photograph of the crucial portion (hopefully you can zoom enough to read the text):



As an aside, I'd like to find a serious philosopher of science who tackles the messy New Age marriage of physics and consciousness, especially in regards to issues like "The Measurement Problem" and "The Uncertainty Principle," but the only materialist voice (which is the perspective I'd like to counterbalance the more idealistic views I've read) on the market I have found is Victor Stenger, and judging from some reviews of his work, he doesn't strike me as a very good philosopher (of course, he wasn't one).

I also should point out that from what I gathered Zukav would consider pure experience 'real' rather than our conceptual formulations of it. He says, "According to quantum field theory, fields alone are real. They are the substance of the universe and not 'matter.' Matter (particles) is simply the momentary manifestations of interacting fields which, intangible and insubstantial as they are, are the only real things in the universe" (italics in original), which begs the question: What the F is a field?! And is the mainstream view of physics still materialism (which still seems to be a popular view but perhaps I'm wrong about that)? It's definitely nothing like the materialism that dominated intellectual circles prior to the twentieth-century.

Personally, I'm leaning more and more to the position that ideas and things are equally real but our only measure for the legitimacy of theory is its usefulness in describing substances, and vice versa, our only measure for the legitimacy of substances is their usefulness in describing theory. Wait, huh?