[gus_massa]

> The model of non-self-interacting gravity is a particle we call a "graviton," and it probably describes reality very well when the gravitation involved is so weak that its self-interaction is undetectable.

I disagree with that part. For the strong force we have the "gluons" and they are considered particles and they have a strong self-interaction. The strong self interaction makes it a huge mess and a lot of things that involve gluons are impossible to calculate.

It's more like:

fake quote> Let's pretend for 30 minutes that the strong field don't self-interact, so we have this nice particles call gluons. Now we add this interaction to the Lagrangian to make gluons interact with other gluons, and now we have a problem.

I agree that that when gravity is small enough, then gravitons give an easy to calculate aproximation. IIRC at high enough energies calculations with gluons get not impossible to calculate too.

[whatshisface]

The thing is, no particle is defined when it interacts. At our present level of understanding the only defined particles are the individual green's functions that appear in perturbation expansions, the lines in Feynman diagrams.

We see interacting particles in detectors, but since nobody can write down what field configuration they mean by "a photon," I can defend my phrasing - but you can defend yours too because I know what a bird is even if I don't know how they work.