"the inhabitants of the universe were conceived to be a set of fields—an electron field, a proton field, an electromagnetic field—and particles were reduced to mere epiphenomena. In its essentials, this point of view has survived to the present day, and forms the central dogma of quantum field theory: THE ESSENTIAL REALITY IS A SET OF FIELDS subject to the rules of special relativity and quantum mechanics; all else is derived as a consequence of the quantum dynamics of these fields. In this view, "THERE IS NO `THERE' THERE" (to quote the poet Gertrude Stein), NO "THINGS" AT ALL. Electrons and other material particles are only force fields in "empty" space, like the field in the "empty" gap between two magnetic poles. This view implies that every "thing," everything, is interactions and motion. It is the interactions and motion themselves that are fundamental rather than the material particles that we had always supposed were doing the interacting and the moving. In a culture still steeped in the Newtonian mechanistic tradition, this would appear to be a significant insight into the nature of physical reality."
Steven Weinberg
[center]
