[tines]

What trips me up is that we don't think of the field being a real physical thing. But isn't the field really the _true_ physical thing, and the wave is just a concept we overlay on it? Like, water is the real physical thing, and the wave is just an arrangement of the water that we recognize as humans. Isn't it the same with the EM and electron fields etc?

[layer8]

For fields, it’s rather that the wave is the only physical/real thing, and there is no separate “substance” that is waving. “Substance” is a concept that disappears in fundamental physics.

[wyager]

At some point this all kind of drifts apart from ontic science and starts to become a matter of narrative or interpretation, but I would generally agree with that.

Waves are mathematically-friendly possible configurations of the underlying system.

It's mathematically valid to choose the most convenient configurations for analysis because the systems are (pretty) linear, so we can just project any actual state into a sum of wave states, apply our mathematical model, and add it all back to get the new real state.

A lot of physical phenomena are composed of pretty predictable distributions of wave states, so projecting from a realistic state to a sum of wave states is usually straightforward enough.

For example, a moving particle looks like the sum of a bunch of waves all closely grouped around a particular wavelength.

[cryptonector]

Think of a field as a set of scalar field strength values, one value at every point in space. It's not a "thing" you can grab or see. The field strength values are based on the distances to and the magnitudes of the "particles" have have {charge, mass, color, whatever} (with the complexity that the particles themselves are really just standing waves, thus the scare quotes).