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

[Alex K]

@bennyboy

A not very subtle difference between the poetry and the physics which you lump together here: it may sound vague and mysterious when translated into everyday language and metaphors. But you've got to be aware that the actual theory is not what you just said, but a very concrete mathematical construct. It makes quantitative predictions to many digits precision before the fact. Only when you try to formulate what's going on in plain english does it sound a bit mythical. Yet, we know exactly what we mean on the maths side, which is parsimonious and with little ambiguity.

I have a few things to say about that.

Well, this is a discussion forum after all!

First of all, applying numbers to the activities of things does not make them less mysterious.  Responding to the light/wave duality of light with "Well duh it's not really either of those things, but I can graph my results remarkably well" doesn't make single-particle interference less mysterious.  The effects of both gravity and magnetic fields are well understood and quantifiable, but that doesn't make either of them less mysterious, either.

Let me ask you - what would make it less mysterious?

I think the first clue is that you describe physics in mathematical terms-- rather than specifying that the math merely represents things, their properties and interactions among them.

I'm not so naive that I think the mathematical objects are immediate real objects in nature, if that was your impression. That notion is falsified by
a simple look at history which shows us that the mathematical objects in theories describing the same type of physics change over time, as in the transition from classical to quantum mechanics.

What, though, is the difference between describing something and using mathematical expressions which represent things? Would you like to have your description in plain English? And if yes, using which words?

  You are describing the relationships among quantities and principles, and it really doesn't matter if there is any "thing," ultimately, there or not.  

What if in the end it's all relationships and interactions that are the real deal, and "objects" are just a construct to describe them? I don't even know what the difference would be.

So in practical terms, I'd say that you DEFINITELY have abstract ideas at work, and you MIGHT have actual things which they represent, or might not, and will probably never know which is the case due to the limitations of making observations.

Is the cup of coffee standing in front of me right now real? How do you describe this cup, and aren't you just using a set of abstract ideas to describe it and there is no actual thing there? My point is, you act as if the problems you raise are somehow special to fundamental physics, and I wonder whether not the ordinary notions of what is real or not are pretty much on the same footing. That wouldn't mean that the question is not interesting, but it would not be criticism that needs to be specifically levied against modern physics. I find the notion naive, that objects in every day experience are somehow more well-defined and more real just because we can describe them using words drawn from experience. It might be an illusion that those are more real and more concrete than our descriptions of electrons using fields or wave functions.