[thylacine]

Phil153 said:[ QUOTE ]
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There's no such thing as a force field , it's just a name we use to make the concept intuitive.

All we know is that when two objects are placed near each other, they start moving toward each other. The rest is still a mystery I believe, but I've been out of the loop a long time.

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Oh that's so 18th Century. You really have been out of the loop.

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And how exactly have we come beyond this point? Unless something has changed in the 8 or so years, I never saw any insight into the nature of the fundamental forces, merely mathematical descriptions of their effects

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The force fileds are physically real. They can be detected. They have mass. They are not merely convenient fictions. This was resolved in the 19th Century.

PairTheBoard said:[ QUOTE ]
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But the general idea is that "fields" are simply attributes of the manifold (usually some sort of configuration space) that one must take into consideration in any physical problem. Strictly speaking, they are smooth functions from M to E, where M is your manifold, and E is some sort of bundle over your manifold.


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ok. But is this mathematical machinery much different in principle than the old high school physics explanation that the Force Field is a collection of vectors defining the direction and magnitude of force that the field would apply at various locations? Where do these vectors come from? How do they get there? What are they made of? So now instead of just vectors we have the mathematical structures of manifolds, connections, bundles, submanifolds, smooth functions, etc. Yes these concepts model well and provide good calculations. But do they give us any better sense of answers to the above questions?

PairTheBoard

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Now if you are saying that the fields are real, and they are modelled very well by various mathematical machinery, but that you would still like to know whats really going on in reality, then I sympathize with that point of view.