Читать книгу String Theory For Dummies - Andrew Zimmerman Jones - Страница 14

Physicists use fields to describe the things that don’t just have a particular position but exist at every point in space. For example, you can think about the temperature in a room as a field — it may be different near an open window than near a hot stove, and you could imagine measuring the temperature at every single point in the room. A field theory, then, is a set of rules that tell you how some field will behave, such as how the temperature in the room changes over time.

In Chapters 7 and 8, you find out about one of the most important achievements of the 20th century: the development of quantum theory. This refers to principles that lead to seemingly bizarre physical phenomena that nonetheless appear to occur in the subatomic world.

When you combine these two concepts, you get quantum field theory: a field theory that obeys the principles of quantum theory. All modern particle physics is described by quantum field theories.