https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNVQfWC_evg&ab_channel=TheRoyalInstitution
One of the punch lines is that energy isn’t continuous. Energy in the world is always parcelled up into some little discrete lump. That’s actually what the word quantum means. Quantum means discrete of a lump. So the real fun start when you try and take the ideas of quantum mechanics, which say that things should be discrete, and you try to combine them with Faraday’s ideas of fields, which are very much continuous, smooth objects, which are waving and oscillating in space. So the idea of trying to combine these two theories together is what we call quantum field theory.
Let me tell you one of the punch lines of quantum mechanics one of the punch lines is that energy isn't continuous. Energy in the world is always parcelled up into some little discrete lump. That's actually what the word quantum means. Quantum means discrete or a lump.
So the real fun starts when you try and take the ideas of quantum mechanics, which say that things should be discrete, and you try to combine them with Faraday's ideas of fields, which are very much continuous, smooth objects, which are waving and oscillating in space. So the idea of trying to combine these two theories together is what we call quantum field theory. And here's the implication of quantum field theory.
The first implication is what happens for the electric and magnetic field. So Faraday taught us, and Maxwell later, that waves of the electromagnetic field are what we call light. But when you apply quantum mechanics to this, you find that these light waves aren't quite as smooth and continuous as they appeared. So if you look closely at light waves, you'll find that they're made of particles. They're little particles of light, and these are particles that we call the photon.
The magic of this idea is that that same principle applies to every single other particle in the universe. So there is spread everywhere throughout this room something that we call the electron field. It's like a fluid that fills this room and, in fact, fills the entire universe. And the ripples of this electron fluid, the ripples of the waves of this fluid, get tied into little bundles of energy by the rules of quantum mechanics, and those bundles of energy are what we call the particle, the electron. All the electrons that are in your body are not fundamental. All the electrons that exist in your body are waves of the same underlying field. And we're all connected to each other. Just like the waves on the ocean all belong to the same underlying ocean, the electrons in your body are ripples of the same field as the electrons in my body. There's more than this. There's also in this room two quark fields. And the ripples of these two quark fields give rise to what we call the up quark and the down quark. And the same is true for every other kind of particle in the universe. There are fields that underlie everything. And what we think of as particles aren't really particles at all, they're waves of these fields tied up into little bundles of energy.
This is the legacy of Faraday. This is where Faraday's vision of fields has taken us. There are no particles in the world. The basic fundamental building blocks of our universe are these fluid-like substances that we call fields.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUMeKDlgKmk&ab_channel=TheRoyalInstitution