Everything is Fields : How Quantum Field Theory Explains What You, Me, and All Things Are Made Of

At the most fundamental level, you are made not of particles or forces. You are made of fields. These strange, fluid-like entities stretch across the universe. What we call particles are ripples in them. What we call forces are fields responding to those ripples. Even empty space is not truly empty, but alive with restless quantum activity. This is the startling vision revealed by quantum field theory: the most successful, most fundamental and least understood framework in modern physics. In Everything is Fields, Cambridge theoretical physicist David Tong gives readers a dazzling, accessible and often very funny guide to this extraordinary idea. Quantum field theory is usually considered the hardest subject in physics, yet it underpins our deepest description of nature: the Standard Model. It explains electrons and quarks, light and magnetism, the strong and weak nuclear forces, the Higgs boson, antimatter, atoms, materials and the early universe. Along the way, Tong brings to life the scientists who uncovered this hidden structure of reality: Faraday imagining invisible lines of force, Maxwell discovering that light is a ripple of electromagnetic fields, Dirac predicting antimatter, Feynman taming infinities and Higgs revealing the field that gives fundamental particles mass. The result is a profound, landmark work of popular science which finally brings quantum field theory to a wide readership and describes everything from the smallest subatomic particle to the dynamics of the entire universe.