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Re: fields are real



At 05:52 PM 3/10/00 -0700, Larry Smith wrote:

Most of my students voted that fields are real,

Good. I hope it was a landslide.

whatever "real" means.

They could look it up in the dictionary. My dictionary says "real" is the
opposite of "fictional".

Ghosts are fictional. Fields are real. If I write a fiction book about
ghosts, I can say pretty much anything I please. For instance, I might say
that they can disappear from inside a box and reappear outside the box
without necessarily passing through the walls of the box. In contrast, if
I write a physics book about fields, I am very highly constrained as to
what I can say. I am constrained by reality. In particular, I cannot say
that that field excitations pass from inside the box to outside without
passing through the walls of the box.