[danbruc]

Now I have to dig out a statement by Nima Arkani-Hamed where he says something like "[...] should bother you if you believed that fields are real." - I of course forgot the most important part but I still remember in which lecture series he said that. If my memories does not mislead me, he was really arguing that you should not think of fields as real things for very concrete reasons. Trying to find it.

[danbruc]

This took way longer than I imagined. I won't repeat the argument here in detail but it essentially boils down to the argument that fields theories are just an effective description of long distance behavior ignoring what is really going on at short distances, that fields are just a convenient tool to make locality manifest and that field theories contain a lot of redundancies due to this.

The statement I was referring to comes 28 minutes into the lecture but you probably have to watch everything up to that point for the full context.

So after watching this again the answer to my question seems pretty clear - fields are not real things. I am still left a bit confused because you very often read and hear that fields are real things and actually more often then the opposite.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tnA7bh7dTqY

[T-A]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1204.4616 :)

[danbruc]

Ohhh no! Just when I thought I got the answer. Just skimmed it and I draw some hope from the fact that the author uses the unconfirmed Unruh effect and wave function collapse, which is as far as I know not a thing because it is not unitary, to explain the double slit experiment. So maybe it is the author who is confused and not the others he is complaining about and I won't have to change my mind once again but I will have to read it way more carefully before drawing any conclusions.