Reality and Philosophy of Electromagnetism |
So many phenomena, we experience in everyday life are such that they have no material existence. Gravity is one such phenomenon, which is a well-defined, mathematically formulated phenomenon, but which is a force not carried by any material or subatomic particle that we could call a 'graviton'. Without having a corporeal actuality, it is just the effect or pull we encounter as an intangible field around the planet.
The field arranges matter in it, but is in itself matterless. It propagates just as equally in a vacuum, which is space without matter. This challenges materialism and invites the metaphysical question: what is the "substance" of a field that is free of particles and exists independent of a medium? Electromagnetism (EM) is a similar phenomenon. EM waves create a field, the effects of which can be detected unchanged in vacuum and in the atmosphere. More so, the EM, studied under the lens of quantum electrodynamics, shows that EM waves also behave similarly to photons of light-waves, which have both wave-like and particle-like characteristics. This leads to the same ontological ambiguity we ask of light-waves: are they particles, or photons? Or are they waves, or just a probability distribution with no real matter on the other side of the equation?
Such questions force us out of the realm of physics, transcending us into metaphysics. They challenge the definitions of reality and identity.
When we are mathematically formulating phenomena such as EM, we are measuring the effects (field) produced by the moving electric charge in an electromagnet, on an EMF meter. And the fact that the nature of the 'effect' produced by this field is constant, reliable and numerically recordable is what makes it 'scientific'. But when we dig deeper, we find that........