Only Particles Exist

The only things that exist are particles.  To be clear, I don’t claim to “understand” any of it.   It makes zero intuitive sense.  But you can read the results of experiments which are repeatable, and simply take the conclusions without expecting them to be intuitive.

In QM, everything is a particle.  A particle is not a ball, but simply a “packet” of energy.  Think of gummy worms that stretch out to infinity, but are all bunched together in one place, with string bundling them.  There is definitely a center to the location of the bunch but there is no actual edge.  And, they have a wavelength inversely proportional to their energy.  I think of the particle as the energy required to bunch the gummy worms together, and not the worms themselves.  The gummy worms don’t exist, nor does the bundling string, only the energy bunching them together.

Energy ONLY  comes in these packets.  There is no battery that can store energy in any other way.  The standard model defines 16 basic particles and their antiparticles, as well as the Higgs particle.  There are a bunch of rules about what has to be conserved:  energy must be conserved, boson number must be conserved, spin must be conserved, charge must be conserved, and quark color must be conserved.   And these quantities come in integer values — precisely quantized.  These rules determine how you are allowed to bunch up the gummy worms.

We don’t have any idea WHY these various quantities need to be conserved.  It just appears that it is true.  If I was to look for evidence of God, I would look there.

Electric fields don’t exist in reality, but are only a mathematical construct that makes it easier to calculate.  When one magnet attracts (or repels) another magnet, what is actually happening is that photons are being exchanged.  Again, the only things that exist are particles.  What we call “fields” are mathematical constructs that allow us to calculate the strength of various interactions we would expect to see.

I was reviewing the simple quantum eraser experiment yesterday.  There is a beam splitter and recombiner, and you put one photon through at a time.  The only explanation is that the photon goes down BOTH paths, and it interferes with ITSELF at the end.  This makes no sense, of course. However, this is what the experiment shows, and it is perfectly repeatable.  What I think is really happening is that the wave equation (a kind of probability field) takes into account all possible interactions with all possible other packets of energy and finally produces an interaction at the output which is consistent with the photon going down both paths, but in reality it never actually “traveled” down either path.  I believe the flaw is thinking that photons “travel”.

This brings into question: what is time?

And then I stop myself before going mad.

The point is: the only things that actually exist are particles, which is why when we say that particles appear “out of nothing” it is because there really is nothing else there except particles.  Most particles appear from other particles.  But virtual particles appear completely on their own.  The quantum field is just a mathematical construct that tells you the probability that something might appear there, but the “quantum field” has no physicality other than the virtual particles that appear and disappear.

Because the only things that exist are particles.