[kadoban]

We're really looking at two (or more) different maps here, not map vs territory.

One of the maps is hey there's these little balls called particles, they bounce around and interact in ways X, Y, Z, etc.

Another is a big page of math that involves excitations of fields that interact. The point is that _this_ one is the best we currently have, but it doesn't let you simply, intuitively and correctly talk about particles interacting (or other things we intuitively want to understand the world in terms of), because those aren't real in the model. They're just an abstraction that usually works at the scale we experience day-to-day.

So yeah, the territory is the territory and neither of these are it, but even getting past that, our best map is just a bunch of math that you just have to take at face value if you want to be as correct as our maps currently allow.

This is meant to address questions like "is light a particle or a wave?" The answer is: No.

It's (according to our best model/map) this bunch of math that doesn't correspond to either one of those, have fun calculating.