| (Disclaimer: I'm not a quantum physicist and the following is not the mainstream opinion) Yet, it's just twisting fields together. The right picture to have is fermions being something like knots on a rope, in a portion of space either you have a knot or you don't. But the knot can be more or less tight, and can be moving and have various shape. When the fields are not coupled, i.e. when particles are far away, the only stable solutions, have a discrete quantity. These quantities are the conserved quantities that are preserved by the field evolution. Typically they are the quadratic values that the symplectic integrator conserve locally. When particles get closer, they can exchange continuously some of the quantities between their fields, but as in a game of musical chair, as soon as the particles get away from each other, they must have taken a seat and settled in one of their discrete values. QFT or quantum physics is like keeping track of the counts of the number of knots on the ropes and model the probabilities of how these values evolve upon collisions. But if you keep track of the rope shape (aka fields phases), you can more precisely predict where the knots are. The catch-22 is that the rope shape is not observable, (in a similar fashion as you can't observe the seed of a random number generator), so you can't make better prediction using the rope model than you could with quantum mechanic. But the "answer" to this catch-22, is that even though with rope mechanics you can't compute the probabilities any faster than QM would (as marginalization isn't fast), you can simulate in same compute complexity as classical system a universe that behaves according (convergence in law) to the probabilities of QM. |