[criddell]

I wish I understood it better, but you don’t have to go much below classical mechanics before I’m lost.

But from what I’ve read, the deeper you go, the more it’s difficult to find something other than mathematics. When you ask what is a particle you find out it’s probably an excitation of a quantum field. So what is a quantum field if not a mathematical structure? Is there a physical reality to wave function collapse?

Maybe it doesn’t matter. The shut up and calculate crowd doesn’t seem to care.

[simonh]

The deeper we go the more objects we find that we can only describe using mathematics, for sure. That’s not the same as them being mathematics though. We don’t know what the essential nature of these objects is.

It is an interesting speculation, but it’s also possible it’s just confusing the map for the terrain.

[criddell]

If mathematics is the only way we know to describe them, then they might be mathematics. That seems like the simplest possible explanation, so that's probably why I suspect it's probably the correct.

It also seems like a comfortable answer to the question about about what's happening every time I cause wave function collapse and split the universe. I'm just creating a new mathematical structure.

[temp512345]

What do you mean something other than mathematics? It's just a language problem nothing else. Just because the English language lacks the descriptive power it does not mean those objects are "mathematical", just as a round ball is not "English" in it's nature just because you can describe it's properties and behavior using that language. A quantum field is just that, a field, it exists just as much as a magnetic field exists and that you can observe directly. It is an area of space where a specific "force" you might say has impact on objects that enter that area of space. It's properties are measurable and they produce consequences in the world and it has a precise description using the language of mathematics

[criddell]

> It is an area of space where a specific "force" you might say has impact on objects that enter that area of space.

Aren't you describing a classical field?

As I understand it, a quantum field is essentially varying probabilities (the wavefunction).

> they produce consequences in the world

They don't produce consequences in the world, they are the world. You and I, we're excitations of a quantum field. We're of the wave function. The quantum field encodes all the information that is us.