'Disembodied' Fields Viewed Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Penrose (2004: 441):

I referred, at the beginning of this chapter, to the fact that a profound shift in Newtonian foundations had already begun in the 19th century, before the revolutions of relativity and quantum theory in the 20th. The first hint that such a change might be needed came from the wonderful experimental findings of Michæl Faraday in about 1833, and from the pictures of reality that he found himself needing in order to accommodate these. Basically, the fundamental change was to consider that the ‘Newtonian particles’ and the ‘forces’ that act between them are not the only inhabitants of our universe. Instead, the idea of a ‘field’, with a disembodied existence of its own was now having to be taken seriously. It was the great Scottish physicist James Clark Maxwell who, in 1864, formulated the equations that this ‘disembodied field’ must satisfy, and he showed that these fields can carry energy from one place to another. These equations unified the behaviour of electric fields, magnetic fields, and even light, and they are now known simply as Maxwell’s equations, the first of the relativistic field equations.

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, the notion of a field as an 'inhabitant of our universe' misconstrues an extent as a thing. The characterisation of a field as 'disembodied' suggests a partial recognition of the fact that a field is not a thing, since physical things are "embodied".

On this basis, fields are the extents of spacetime in which specific 'behaviours' (e.g. the 'carrying of energy from place to place') unfold.