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I had several things going yesterday and was trying to respond to Sherlock’s rapid fire posts, so I missed this,

I know what they are talking about it’s called “something” not “nothing” though. Nothing is the absence of anything, mass, charge, dimensionality, spin, statistical properties and so on. That’s what most people take it to mean and most of us do not feel the need to describe something as nothing to make ourselves appear more profound than we actually are.

First, if you look around, you can find Krauss saying that nothing is something, so the whole argument is a bit moot, but then I wanted to know what defines a quantum field. Does it have mass and charge etc? This was a nice succinct explanation, although with quantum theory, there’s always some confusion.

It explains classical fields are the ones Sherlock is referring to as “physical”, they have mass and charge. Quantum fields aren’t generated by matter, rather what we observe as matter, is a quantum field. An electron doesn’t have well-defined position and momentum though. Where it is can only be predicted with probability, not certainty. It’s not a particle, you can’t say what speed it is moving. It gets confusing because they interchange field and particle, something about the fields “encode the information”. The difference is, fields are everywhere. And if I get it, a quantum field is not stable or predictable, it keeps creating bubbles that result in universes, like ours. They don’t always result in the stable laws of physics we know and love, but at least once, they did.