Thousands of years of philosophy and literature and we're still like, what the shit even is up with us.

@starkatt Centuries of science later, and the best answer we're able to come up with so far is "it's like, a whole shitton of waves across this weird meta-pixellated medium that we can't directly interact with all acting in unison and consistently falling together in a whole bunch of set patterns that we call particles".

@Thaminga so the thing about stuff like QFT is that I feel like our understanding, possibly even with tools like mathematics, is fundamentally metaphorical.

@Thaminga also lol at anyone who thinks "things" are "made out of" smaller things.

@Thaminga anyway I get the sense that the word "field" can cause confusion because in common usage it often means something like "zone of influence" when it's my rough understanding that it's actually intended more like "continuous array of values".

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@starkatt @Thaminga Even worse, it has multiple different scientific meanings. In mathematics, it's a ring in which every element (optionally, other than the zero element) has a multiplicative inverse (the rational numbers, for example, are a field)

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