〈 Berger | Dillon 〉

What do you think is the best way to get across its physical significance?

Why not, I’ll stop dancing. I think that all that exists are fields. It naturally gives an intuition for signal speed and dissolves the “spooky action at a distance” But particles are certainly real, and describing them as quanta of their corresponding fields 1/n ..

absorbs all our ontological ignorance into the word “quanta”.. it’s not quite clear to me what this means wrt field excitations Naievely I would say that it’s an excitation like a drop of water in a splash that breaks free.. for quantum fields the drops can only have 2/3

Specific “sizes”, as it were. By sizes I mean quantum numbers 3/3

And so cross sections would carry physical information relevant to this, hence why you think they’re the most relevant?

Well cross sections carry the same amount of QUANTUM information as the matrix elements, is my claim

cross sections are cool. and as a structural realist, i think they are real patterns. but i don't think they are nearly fundamental. they are a statistic that summarizes some facts about effective field theory in a limiting case.

Anything that is robust under the renorm group is my favorite kind of thing to make ontological commitments to