Fields that are bundled into quanta

English translation: continuous regions affected by a force that are turned (divided) into discrete "packets" (quanta)

GLOSSARY ENTRY (DERIVED FROM QUESTION BELOW)
English term or phrase:Fields that are bundled into quanta
Selected answer:continuous regions affected by a force that are turned (divided) into discrete "packets" (quanta)
Entered by: Charles Davis

18:27 May 9, 2019
English language (monolingual) [PRO]
Science - Physics / quantum mechanics
English term or phrase: Fields that are bundled into quanta
Dear colleagues,

I'm not sure about the meaning of “fields that are bundled into quanta”, in the passage below taken from the book Tales of the Quantum by Art Hobson. Actually, this is a quote in a book on a meditation practice, and unfortunately I know very little of quantum mechanics.
Many thanks in advance for your help!


************

At least since the days of the early Greeks, philosophical people have wanted to know the ultimate constituents of the universe. What is the stuff of reality and how does it behave? . . . Atoms and everything else are made of things more fundamental and even more intriguing than atoms, namely *** ‘fields’ that are bundled into ‘quanta.’ ***
haribert
Local time: 13:41
continuous regions affected by a force that are turned (divided) into discrete "packets" (quanta)
Explanation:
I am not a physicist.

I think the stumbling block here is "bundled". It is natural to understand this as meaning things being grouped or "wrapped" together. But I think the key to this is that it effectively means the opposite: "bundled" means "turned into bundles", and since we are talking about fields, that means, in everyday terms, that a continuum is divided up into discrete units. This is the basic idea behind quantum physics: waves are particles (and particles are waves, or rather fields).

Physicists quite often use the word "bundle" to refer to fundamental particles, be they photons, electrons, gluons or whatever. Here are some examples from a book about particle physics:

"At the end of the nineteenth century, the existence of atoms was little more than hypothesis. Today the reality of these tiny bundles of matter is accepted as indisputable."
"Strip an atom of its electrons and you are left with its nucleus, a compact bundle"
"bundles of light, or photons"
"gluons – the quantum bundles of the strong force field that normally binds the quarks to one another"
"The gluons are massless bundles of strong radiation just as the photon is a massless bundle of electromagnetic radiation"

Well, the authors describe Max Planck's famous insight as follows:

"It was in attempting to explain the broad spectrum of radiation emitted from objects, that the German physicist Max Planck realized in 1900 that the radiation must be bundled into ‘quanta’, which we now call photons."
https://epdf.tips/the-particle-odyssey-a-journey-to-the-hear...

I think it is clear that to say that radiation is "bundled" here means that it is divided into bundles.
Einstein elaborated this insight in 1905: Here's an account intended for lay readers:

"In this paper [...] Einstein first put forward his theory that light was divided into ‘quanta’ which we now call photons. Newton had believed that light came in little bundles but by 1900 observations had shown that light behaved like a wave. By assuming that light also consisted of discrete packets, Einstein predicted the photoelectric effect"
https://royalsoc.org.au/images/pdf/journal/138_Kelly2.pdf

And this is further clarified by this very accessible account of quantum field theory:

"According to our best laws of physics, the fundamental building blocks of Nature are not discrete particles at all. Instead they are continuous fluid-like substances, spread throughout all of space. We call these objects fields.
[...]
From Fields to Particles
If you look closely enough at electromagnetic waves, you'll find that they are made out of particles called photons. The ripples of the electric and magnetic fields get turned into particles when we include the effects of quantum mechanics.
But this same process is at play for all other particles that we know of. There exists, spread thinly throughout space, something called an electron field. Ripples of the electron field get tied up into a bundle of energy by quantum mechanics. And this bundle of energy is what we call an electron. Similarly, there is a quark field, and a gluon field, and Higgs boson field. Every particle your body --- indeed, every particle in the Universe --- is a tiny ripple of the underlying field, moulded into a particle by the machinery of quantum mechanics."
http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/tong/whatisqft.html

--------------------------------------------------
Note added at 17 hrs (2019-05-10 11:34:24 GMT)
--------------------------------------------------

It's a pleasure!
I have made many attempts to understand quantum physics, reading very slowly and concentrating hard, and have made some progress, but it remains very mysterious. I think that the root of the problem, for those of us who are not fluent in advanced mathematics, is that it's about phenomena that are completely alien to anything we can experience, but we can only talk about those phenomena by using metaphors from ordinary experience (like "bundle"). So these metaphors never really express the true nature of what they're trying to describe. You can't picture "ripples of the electron field being tied up into a bundle" (or at least I can't).
Selected response from:

Charles Davis
Spain
Local time: 13:41
Grading comment
Dear Charles, I am sincerely grateful to you for your help!
Many thanks also to all other participants for their useful remarks!
4 KudoZ points were awarded for this answer



SUMMARY OF ALL EXPLANATIONS PROVIDED
3 +2continuous regions affected by a force that are turned (divided) into discrete "packets" (quanta)
Charles Davis
3 -2operating forces that are wrapped together into little packages of lighting energy
Juan Arturo Blackmore Zerón
Summary of reference entries provided
field
M.A.B.

Discussion entries: 7





  

Answers


41 mins   confidence: Answerer confidence 3/5Answerer confidence 3/5 peer agreement (net): -2
fields that are bundled into quanta
operating forces that are wrapped together into little packages of lighting energy


Explanation:
My opinion.

Juan Arturo Blackmore Zerón
Mexico
Local time: 07:41
Native speaker of: Spanish
Notes to answerer
Asker: Thank you very much, Juan Arturo, for your contribution!


Peer comments on this answer (and responses from the answerer)
neutral  Bashiqa: perhaps "light" energy
41 mins

disagree  M.A.B.: I don't think so. Has nothing to do with physical fields nor quanta.
2 hrs

disagree  Daryo: very interesting story, but not much relation to what are "fields" in physics, nor "quanta" ...
5 hrs

neutral  cmile: It's ok till that word "lighting"... They are packets of fields, as Charles said, now the asker just needs to realize what the meaning of the word field is in physics. It's where force comes from (like you nicely said 'cause forces are derived from field)
1 day 17 mins
Login to enter a peer comment (or grade)

3 hrs   confidence: Answerer confidence 3/5Answerer confidence 3/5 peer agreement (net): +2
fields that are bundled into quanta
continuous regions affected by a force that are turned (divided) into discrete "packets" (quanta)


Explanation:
I am not a physicist.

I think the stumbling block here is "bundled". It is natural to understand this as meaning things being grouped or "wrapped" together. But I think the key to this is that it effectively means the opposite: "bundled" means "turned into bundles", and since we are talking about fields, that means, in everyday terms, that a continuum is divided up into discrete units. This is the basic idea behind quantum physics: waves are particles (and particles are waves, or rather fields).

Physicists quite often use the word "bundle" to refer to fundamental particles, be they photons, electrons, gluons or whatever. Here are some examples from a book about particle physics:

"At the end of the nineteenth century, the existence of atoms was little more than hypothesis. Today the reality of these tiny bundles of matter is accepted as indisputable."
"Strip an atom of its electrons and you are left with its nucleus, a compact bundle"
"bundles of light, or photons"
"gluons – the quantum bundles of the strong force field that normally binds the quarks to one another"
"The gluons are massless bundles of strong radiation just as the photon is a massless bundle of electromagnetic radiation"

Well, the authors describe Max Planck's famous insight as follows:

"It was in attempting to explain the broad spectrum of radiation emitted from objects, that the German physicist Max Planck realized in 1900 that the radiation must be bundled into ‘quanta’, which we now call photons."
https://epdf.tips/the-particle-odyssey-a-journey-to-the-hear...

I think it is clear that to say that radiation is "bundled" here means that it is divided into bundles.
Einstein elaborated this insight in 1905: Here's an account intended for lay readers:

"In this paper [...] Einstein first put forward his theory that light was divided into ‘quanta’ which we now call photons. Newton had believed that light came in little bundles but by 1900 observations had shown that light behaved like a wave. By assuming that light also consisted of discrete packets, Einstein predicted the photoelectric effect"
https://royalsoc.org.au/images/pdf/journal/138_Kelly2.pdf

And this is further clarified by this very accessible account of quantum field theory:

"According to our best laws of physics, the fundamental building blocks of Nature are not discrete particles at all. Instead they are continuous fluid-like substances, spread throughout all of space. We call these objects fields.
[...]
From Fields to Particles
If you look closely enough at electromagnetic waves, you'll find that they are made out of particles called photons. The ripples of the electric and magnetic fields get turned into particles when we include the effects of quantum mechanics.
But this same process is at play for all other particles that we know of. There exists, spread thinly throughout space, something called an electron field. Ripples of the electron field get tied up into a bundle of energy by quantum mechanics. And this bundle of energy is what we call an electron. Similarly, there is a quark field, and a gluon field, and Higgs boson field. Every particle your body --- indeed, every particle in the Universe --- is a tiny ripple of the underlying field, moulded into a particle by the machinery of quantum mechanics."
http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/tong/whatisqft.html

--------------------------------------------------
Note added at 17 hrs (2019-05-10 11:34:24 GMT)
--------------------------------------------------

It's a pleasure!
I have made many attempts to understand quantum physics, reading very slowly and concentrating hard, and have made some progress, but it remains very mysterious. I think that the root of the problem, for those of us who are not fluent in advanced mathematics, is that it's about phenomena that are completely alien to anything we can experience, but we can only talk about those phenomena by using metaphors from ordinary experience (like "bundle"). So these metaphors never really express the true nature of what they're trying to describe. You can't picture "ripples of the electron field being tied up into a bundle" (or at least I can't).

Charles Davis
Spain
Local time: 13:41
Native speaker of: English
PRO pts in category: 8
Grading comment
Dear Charles, I am sincerely grateful to you for your help!
Many thanks also to all other participants for their useful remarks!
Notes to answerer
Asker: Charles, thank you so much! You've been really kind to provide all these useful links! Actually, I've bought Art Hobson's book (and many others on quantum physics) but unfortunately I didn't have the time to read all of them.

Asker: Charles, I fully agree with you! It's a very interesting field, really; e.g. concepts like "wave function collapse" or of entanglement are really intriguing, but it's not so easy to "picture" them... Thank you very much again!


Peer comments on this answer (and responses from the answerer)
agree  Daryo: adding that a "quanta" can not be further subdivided (as far as we know for now..) // OTOH this ST sounds like being written by someone who is abusing quantum physics to peddle some quasi-philosophical BS
3 hrs
  -> Thanks, Daryo :-) Probably so, though this particular part seems to have been written by a genuine physicist.

agree  cmile: I like that word "packets" you used. I think that word "field" also confuses people. It's because we first learn force, but force is derived from the field... It's like being in some kind of environment (field) where some phenomenon is acting (a force).
21 hrs
  -> Thanks very much! "Packet" is a word people sometimes use to describe quanta, and I agree that it's a good choice.
Login to enter a peer comment (or grade)




Reference comments


13 mins
Reference: field

Reference information:
In physics, a field is a physical quantity, represented by a number or tensor, that has a value for each point in space-time.[1][2][3] For example, on a weather map, the surface temperature is described by assigning a real number to each point on a map; the temperature can be considered at a fixed point in time or over some time interval, if one wants to study the dynamics of temperature change. A surface wind map, assigning a vector to each point on a map that describes the wind velocity at that point, would be an example of a 1 dimensional tensor field. Field theories, mathematical descriptions of how field values change in space and time, are ubiquitous in physics. For instance, the electric field is another rank 1 tensor field, and the full description of electrodynamics can be formulated in terms of two interacting vector fields at each point in space-time, or as a single rank 2 tensor field theory.[4][5][6]

--------------------------------------------------
Note added at   14 min (2019-05-09 18:42:49 GMT)
--------------------------------------------------

In physics, a quantum (plural: quanta) is the minimum amount of any physical entity (physical property) involved in an interaction. The fundamental notion that a physical property may be "quantized" is referred to as "the hypothesis of quantization".[1] This means that the magnitude of the physical property can take on only discrete values consisting of integer multiples of one quantum.

For example, a photon is a single quantum of light (or of any other form of electromagnetic radiation). Similarly, the energy of an electron bound within an atom is quantized and can exist only in certain discrete values. (Indeed, atoms and matter in general are stable because electrons can exist only at discrete energy levels within an atom.) Quantization is one of the foundations of the much broader physics of quantum mechanics. Quantization of energy and its influence on how energy and matter interact (quantum electrodynamics) is part of the fundamental framework for understanding and describing nature.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum

--------------------------------------------------
Note added at   15 min (2019-05-09 18:43:29 GMT)
--------------------------------------------------

But I'm not sure what the author meant by "bundling fields into quanta"


    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_(physics)
M.A.B.
Poland
Specializes in field
Native speaker of: Native in PolishPolish
PRO pts in category: 8
Note to reference poster
Asker: Thank you, M.A.B., for this reference! Unfortunately, I still do not understand how field can "bundled" into quanta... Sorry..

Asker: Neither do I! yet, Art Hobson is an expert in the field (sorry for the pun on words!)

Login to enter a peer comment (or grade)



Login or register (free and only takes a few minutes) to participate in this question.

You will also have access to many other tools and opportunities designed for those who have language-related jobs (or are passionate about them). Participation is free and the site has a strict confidentiality policy.

KudoZ™ translation help

The KudoZ network provides a framework for translators and others to assist each other with translations or explanations of terms and short phrases.


See also:
Term search
  • All of ProZ.com
  • Term search
  • Jobs
  • Forums
  • Multiple search