In my last blog I objected to a statement made by physicist David Tong in the December 2012 Scientific American who said it is a "lie" that the building blocks of nature are discrete particles such as the electron or quark. Rather, Tong asserted, the building blocks of our theories are quantum fields.
Here I want to explain why this is not just a pedagogical issue, a trivial dispute between two eggheads. It has real consequences on how scholars outside of physics, as well as the reading public, interpret the dramatic developments in fundamental physics, both experimental and theoretical, that began early in the twentieth century and continue today. Believe it or not, the particle-field debate affects heavy discussions on theology, spirituality and the interaction of religion and science.
Those who read the popular literature on science and religion, such as Tong's article, may receive the impression that modern physics has refuted the picture of atoms and the void proposed by Democritus and other Greek philosophers millennia ago. For example, in The New Sciences of Religion: Exploring Spirituality From the Outside in and Bottom Up, Christian apologist William Grassie says, "The concept of materialism deconstructed itself with the advent of quantum mechanics and particle physics."
To be ecumenical, Grassie quotes the Hindu physicist Varadaraja V. Raman: "Physics has penetrated into the substratum of perceived reality and discovered a whole new realm of entities there, beyond the imagination of the most creative minds of the past."