What is a Field?

I think I have heard of that, I think they call that a watch that uses a quarks crystal?

Willem certainly does believe in quantity over quality. He clearly (to me) is just throwing stuff out there with little or no thought behind it, so I guess he is just a troll. At first I thought he was one of these guys that thinks he is some kind of misunderstood genius, but based on what we have learned about him - my take is he is just trying to annoy what he sees as the atheist scientist.

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I think you're right...!

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That is true. There's been no evidence for any of his claims so far, even explicit admissions that he has no evidence whatsoever. Some of his claims have been shown to be bad (e.g. various cases of circular reasoning), or downright wrong.

You'd think somebody that's spending serious time studying science would focus on that first, before coming up with all kinds of all-over-the-place ideas.

I can't argue with that.

But I'm proud that you imagine him thinking of us as scientists. That's high praise!

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The closest I come to being a scientist is that my son is a scientist, he has a PhD in Material Science. Thanks for giving me yet another chance to gush proudly over my scientist son. If only he were an atheist... alas.

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Then surely he can help us build this fancy clock!

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Cool! That's indeed a very nice accomplishment (of you both!

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In my opinion, scientists recently haven't been getting the praise they deserve in my opinion, so I'm happy to help.

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Yes that picture is more like the first case, i.e. in which the field is a representation of the value of the state vector at any point in space. I have no trouble with that as a concept.

But the idea of "exciting" (like an electromagnetic coil, or an electron in an atom) a mathematical representation of vector values strikes me as suddenly treating the map as the territory, without explaining why one can make that jump.

(I should stress that I am doing no more than articulate where my personal discomfort arises: no doubt a result of my not having learned QFT.

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Then Gravitons are not required and yet they are predicted by String Theory.

 

Please don't quote-mine. String theory is not "in the context of curved spacetime (i.e. GR)".