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

[Surgenator]

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In between reading Aristotle's treatises on physics, astronomy, biology, psychology, and metaphysics, ethics, and literature, I've detoured into a few modern books on the subjects of biology and physics, namely, Carl Zimmer's At The Water's Edge (a must-read), Gary Zukav's The Dancing Wu Li Masters, and now I'm on to Julian Barbour's The End of Time. Both of the physics books (granting I haven't yet begun to read the latter but based on impression) seem "out there" to some extent, as in unconventional. Gary Zukav, though he seems very popular with Oprah and the self-help brand of quantum pseudoscience, actually impressed me with The Dancing Wu Li Masters. I was expecting a lot more "woo" but it was a pretty solid, straight-down-the-line physics text that went through the major discoveries of the last 115 years (actually, the book was written in 1979, so of course it didn't include anything from the past 35 years). I'd say about 90-95% was excellent translation of difficult mathematical concepts that physicists have experimentally verified as useful (what 'truth' means scientifically, which is essentially pragmatic) into plain English, and only 5-10% eastern philosophy. That said, there was one thing he wrote that I wanted to get further clarification on (Zukav isn't a physicist but he had five read his manuscript before publication, including David Finklestein, Henry Stapp, and Jack Sarfatti... some of whom have made rather outlandish and controversial claims at times). He said that particles are not actual things. They're ideas. On some level, it seems difficult to see how this could be deemed incorrect when the very notion of discrete objects (particles) that behave like waves and display non-local effects is utterly abstruse and incompatible with everything we directly perceive or are even able to picture when dealing with physical things. The popular physicist Sean Carroll, whom I take to be fairly representative of current mainstream views in physics, also says that we should picture particles to be excitations of energy fields... but what is a field? Is it an abstract construct that we use to predict how events unfold (do they really even 'unfold' in the time-dependent sense we typically mean?) or an actual physical 'thing'? Zukuv quotes a number of monumental discoverers, such as Max Born, Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Warner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrodinger, David Bohm, John Bell, and John von Neumann, amongst others, as sharing similar sentiments about the idealization of physics and its incompatibility with classical logic. He even quotes Bertrand Russell as saying that "mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true," yet everything beyond the atomic scale is virtually describable only in terms of mathematical concepts. So, what is a particle, or a field, or a wave-function, or a probability-function, or 'collapse,' etc.? Are these representative of real things, or are they merely mental constructs that we find useful in describing our experiences?

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First off, you write too much. I almost avoided the thread because of the sheer wall of text that stood before me.

It is an interesting question on what is more 'real', the field or the particle. We know particles cause fields (electrons cause an electric field). We also know that fundamental particles can combine and break up into other fundamental particles (e-e+ -> Z -> u-u+). So which is more fundamental in my opinion, neither. I believe the particles and the field are two sides of the same coin. The particle can be though of as an excitation of the field, but that analogy only goes so far. You cannot de-excite the field to a point where the particle no longer exist (e.g. violation of lepton number). So the field and the particle seem interlinked; hence, my belief that they are one thing viewed at two different ways.

As for the question about particles being ideas, I find it absurd. There are possibly an uncountable number of ideas that we can come up. However, there is ~28 fundamental particles that we deal with in our regular lives. So you can argue that a majority of ideas are composites of other ideas. Which is a good start, but then how do you know which ideas are fundamental. How can you test if the idea is fundamental? Plus, a fundamental idea would presumably be able to do only one thing, e.g. the idea of moving to the right. However, a photon can do more than one thing. Since the photon is the messenger particle of the electromagnetic force, it can cause another particle to move closer or farther away.