One of the most challenging aspects of writing a book or blog about the universe (as physicists currently understand it) is that both writer and reader must confront the concept of fields. The problem isn’t that fields are intrinsically that complicated. It’s that they are an unfamiliar abstraction — and novel abstractions of any sort are always difficult both for a writer to describe and for a reader to grasp.
What I’ll do today is give an explanation of fields that is complementary to the one that appears in the book’s chapters 13 and 14. The book’s approach is slow, methodical, and detailed, but today’s will be more of an overview, brief and relatively shallow, and presented in a different order. You will likely come away with many unanswered questions, but the book should help with that. And if the book and today’s post combined are still not enough, you can ask a question in the comments below, or on the book question page.
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