The Evolution of Physics – by Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld , Simon and Schuster, New York, 1938 pages 257-258.
“Our structure laws, that is, Maxwell’s laws and the gravitational laws, breakdown for very great concentrations of energy or, as we may say, where sources of the field, that is electric charges or matter, are present. But could we not slightly modify our equations so that they would be valid everywhere, even in region where energy is enormously concentrated?
We cannot build on the basis of the matter-concept alone. But the division into matter and field is, after the recognition of the equivalence of mass and energy, something artificial and not clearly defined. Could we not reject the concept of matter and build a pure field physics? What impresses our senses as matter is really a great concentration of energy into a comparatively small space. We could regard matter as the regions in space where the field is extremely strong. In this way a new philosophical background could be created. Its final aim would be the explanation of all events in nature by structure laws valid always and everywhere. A thrown stone is, from this point of view, a changing field, where the states of greatest field intensity travel through space with the velocity of the stone. There would be no place in our new physics, for both field and matter, field being the only reality. This new view is suggested by great achievements of field physics, by our success in expressing the laws of electricity, magnetism, gravitation in the form of structure laws, and finally by the equivalence of mass and energy. Our ultimate problem would be to modify field laws in such a way that they would not break down for regions in which the energy is enormously concentrated.
But we have not so far succeeded in fulfilling this program convincingly and consistently. The decision, as to whether it is possible to carry it out, belongs to the future. At present we must still assume in all our actual theoretical constructions two realities: field and matter.”
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Nature is an intriguing thing to think about and study. We humans have this need to understand nature and to create mathematical models of the natural phenomena so we can predict how things will change. Good models of nature are only good until an experiment shows measurements that are inconsistent with the model and then there is need for a new or revised model to continue our pursue of understanding nature.
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