[itishappy]

The magnetic field is one which you've probably had a chance to experience for yourself. Wave a magnet around a magnetic field and you can feel it has a different effect at different points in space. Fields are just time and space varying values for physical properties. Is the universe being composed of magnetism and a few related fields really so nonsensical?

[binary132]

Not really, until you go “well, what’s magnetism made of?” and the answer is “a field!” That’s pretty nonsensical.

[itishappy]

I disagree! I think fields are very intuitive and it's everything else that's nonsensical!

Magnetism isn't made of anything. It is a field, and it's one your can interact with directly.

Compare that with, say, table salt. "What's table salt made of?" Uh. It's made of atoms entirely unrelated to salt, like sodium and chlorine. "What are atoms made of?" Uh. They're made of tiny electric particles zipping around at relativistic speeds but bound together by forces like magnetism.

Richard Feynman does a better job than me of describing this exact problem in one of my favorite physics videos of all time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1lL-hXO27Q

[binary132]

“Magnetism isn’t made of anything” is a nonsensical statement, of course it is made of something, we just don’t know what. That’s why “it’s made of fields” is nonsensical, it’s no different than saying “it’s made of atoms” and then refusing to think about what an atom is. “Atoms aren’t made of anything, it IS an atom”.

[itishappy]

> of course it is made of something

Why do you say that? Do you think there's anything fundamental?

We actually were convinced atoms were fundamental for a while, until we stumbled upon evidence they're not. Now we think fields are fundamental, and as far as I know, we have no reason to believe otherwise.

[binary132]

fields are just a descriptive mathematical device or language for expressing how something we don’t understand at all behaves, but this discussion is going to start going even further down the zany “language isn’t real” rabbithole where nothing means anything and no meaning can be communicated so I guess it’s kinda moot

[itishappy]

That's where we disagree: I think we understand them quite well. Well enough that there's no open questions leading us to believe there must be something else. Fields alone describe all of modern physics. As such, there's no indication that there's something more fundamental than fields.

Contrast this with atoms: there are things atoms alone cannot explain, like the Zeeman and Stark effects. There must be something more fundamental going on. (Spoiler: It's fields.)