The Universe requires quantum fields, not just quantum particles | by Ethan Siegel | Starts With A Bang! | Jul, 2025
Realizing that matter and energy are quantized is important, but quantum particles aren’t the full story; quantum fields are needed, too.
Of all the revolutionary ideas that science has entertained, perhaps the most bizarre and counterintuitive one is the notion of quantum mechanics. Previously, scientists had assumed that the Universe was deterministic, in the sense that the laws of physics would enable you to predict with perfect accuracy how any system would evolve into the future. We assumed that our reductionist approach to the Universe — where we searched for the smallest constituents of reality and worked to understand their properties — would lead us to the ultimate knowledge of things. If we could know what things were made of and could determine the rules that governed them, nothing, at least in principle, would be beyond our ability to predict.
This assumption was quickly shown not to be true when it comes to the quantum Universe. When you reduce what’s real to its smallest components, you find that you can divide all forms of matter and energy into indivisible parts: quanta. However, these quanta no longer behave in a deterministic fashion, but only in a probabilistic one. Even with that addition, however…
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