- #141
Hurkyl
Staff Emeritus
Science Advisor
Gold Member
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Inference can understand the relation between different phenomena and through understanding this relation something about a subtle phenomena can be understood through its relation to a gross phenomena.
I'm surprised nobody has picked up on this aspect of what you said:
One can understand the small through its relation to the large.
You have suggested that the modern physics of the small is invalid because it is dealing with things that are "beyond perception". However, we can infer about such things based on their interactions with things that aren't beyond perception.
And, incidentally, the reverse is just as important. We can infer about the large through its interactions with the small, which allows us to do, for instance, astronomy.
What is the difference between a point particle and a localized quantum field?
I'm probably wrong, but this is how I understand it:
The "average" of such a field behaves like we would expect a point particle to behave. Not exactly as such, but very similarly. For many problems, the difference is insignificant enough that it does not affect results, thus we can approximate them as point particles.
For a very simplistic analogy, imagine we have a very long string. We can wiggle the string which causes waves to form. These waves are carrying energy. If the waves are small enough, then their spatial extent may be irrelevant for the problems we're doing, and we can treat them as if we have created particles that are carrying energy instead of wiggling a string to produce a wave, which may greatly simplify whatever we were trying to calculate.
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