I taught AP Physics and Physics and Physical Science (along with Environmental Science, Life Science, and Earth & Space Science) for almost twenty years. I’d introduce the field concept early in the course, and everything that notion seems to clarify. The gravitational field, the electromagnetic field, the wave collapse, and wave functions, etc., all work better as long as you have a playing field. Much like our sports today. There’s a value assigned to every point in space, smoothly varying, mathematically tractable, and extraordinarily powerful as a predictive tool. Students felt the elegance of it, and so did I. You could describe the behavior of matter across any scale with the same formalism. The cosmos, it seemed, was fundamentally a manifold of field values, and once you understood that, you understood something deep about reality itself.
I am no longer sure that’s true. Not because the physics is wrong (it isn’t, at least in our human understanding of the Cosmos with our current framing), but because I have come to suspect that the field picture, however useful, is describing something derived rather than something fundamental. And I think the place I’m standing right now, on the bank of Lawson’s Fork in the South Carolina Piedmont, is better evidence of what the cosmos actually is than any field equation.
That’s a large claim. Let me try to earn it or unpack this at least.
In 1980, the philosopher Hartry Field published a book called Science Without Numbers that caused something of a stir in the philosophy of mathematics. His argument was deceptively simple, I think. Basically, the fact that mathematics is indispensable for doing physics doesn’t mean that mathematical entities (numbers, functions, sets) actually exist. Mathematics might be extraordinarily useful without being true, much like some would claim about religion. Field called this position fictionalism, and he went on to demonstrate, technically, that you could reformulate Newtonian gravitational theory without any reference to numbers at all, replacing numerical values with purely relational predicates borrowed from geometry.(1) The numbers, he showed, were conservative over the underlying physical facts… they generated no new physical information beyond what the relational structure already implied. They were a powerful fiction, not a fundamental reality.
Field’s project was aimed at numbers. But the argument licenses something further. If indispensability for prediction is no guarantee of ontological fundamentality, then the same skepticism can be turned on the field descriptions that physics has inherited and extended since Maxwell (my favorite) and Einstein. The electromagnetic, gravitational, and quantum fields are extraordinarily useful for prediction. They are not, on that account alone, fundamental features of reality. They might be conservative over something more primordial… something that field theory represents without quite reaching. The question is what that something might be.
Henri Bergson spent much of his philosophical career pressing exactly this question against the physics of his own time, and his answer still appeals to many of us. For Bergson, the deepest problem with mathematical physics is not its precision but its treatment of time. A field value is assigned to a point in spacetime, a frozen coordinate, mathematically exact and stripped of duration. The continuous field is the smooth assembly of such frozen moments across an abstract manifold. This, Bergson argued, is the intellectualist distortion of real time, lived time, the time of actual processes, being not a coordinate. It is duration, qualitative, irreversible, thick with the past, that has accumulated in it. (2) A field value at a spacetime point doesn’t capture duration necessarily but does eliminate it.
In physics, this means the field of formalism is, in a specific and precise sense, conservative with respect to durational facts. It extracts from the living reality of process exactly what is measurable (such as position, magnitude, rate of change) while leaving the ontological substrate of durée untouched and undescribed. Bergson is not saying physics is wrong. He is saying it is a useful abstraction from something more realistic or deeper, and that mistaking the abstraction for the fundamental thing is a category error with consequences.
At Lawson’s Fork here in Spartanburg, duration is not an abstraction. The creek carries its own past in its channel morphology, its sediment load, its riparian forest, and the chemical memory of every storm and drought since the last ice age. What I encounter when I sit at the shoal is not a field value. It is the thickness, with the accumulated duration of a place that has been doing this longer than the Piedmont has been the Piedmont. You can assign temperature, velocity, and dissolved oxygen values to the water at this point. You cannot assign a field value to what it means for this water to be here, now, still.
Gilles Deleuze sharpens this. In Difference and Repetition, he argues that extensive quantities (like the kinds of quantities field theory assigns to points in space ) are actualizations of something more primordial, such as intensive difference. (3) A temperature gradient is intensive. It has direction, it drives the process, and it is the condition of heat flow before it becomes measurable as a rate. A temperature field value is the extensive representation of that intensity, which you get when you cancel the gradient into a number. The number is real and useful. But the gradient came first, ontologically. The difference is more fundamental than the magnitude.
For ecology, this is almost self-evident. What ecosystems run on is intensity from thermal gradients, hydrological pressure differentials, chemical potential differences across membranes and soil horizons, and trophic gradients from light-saturated surface to benthic dark. These intensive differences are what ecological work is about. They drive nutrient cycling, species distribution, evolutionary pressure, and succession. The field descriptions represent these intensities by extending them into magnitudes, thereby systematically concealing what is ontologically prior. Ecology, properly understood, is a science of intensive differences and similarities. Field theory is the science of extensive magnitude. Obviously, they are not describing the same level of reality.
Alfred North Whitehead made this argument in a different way, and Michael Epperson’s more recent work connecting Whitehead’s process metaphysics to quantum mechanics has recently given it new precision. Whitehead’s central claim in Process and Reality is that the extensive continuum, or the spacetime manifold that underlies field theory, is not primitive but derivative. (4) It is constituted by the mutual implication of what Whitehead calls actual occasions as irreducibly local events of experience in a broad sense, each taking account of its environment, each contributing its achieved definiteness to the world that follows. The field is the abstract pattern that emerges from the creative advance of actual occasions. It is real, but it is not where reality begins.
Epperson’s contribution is to show that this Whiteheadian picture is not merely a philosophical preference, but it resolves genuine problems in the interpretation of quantum mechanics. The wave function, in Epperson’s reading, is not a field in physical space at all. It is a description of potentiality, the structured possibility space of an actual occasion prior to its determination. The so-called collapse of the wave function is the creative advance from potentiality to actuality and the event in which an occasion achieves its definiteness in relation to its environment. (5) The field formalism is conservative over this event structure as it generates the right predictions without describing what is actually occurring at the level of individual occasions.
What Whitehead and Epperson together suggest is that the cosmos is made of events, not fields. Events that are irreducibly local, durational, relational, and in some broad sense experiential, events that take account of their context rather than merely occupying coordinates in it. This is ontologically closer to an ecosystem than to a manifold.
Here is where plasma physics enters, and the argument takes on a different weight.
Plasma is the dominant state of matter in the observable universe, accounting for something in the range of ninety-nine percent by volume. Stars, the interstellar medium, the vast filamentary structures of the cosmic web… all plasma. And plasma physics is, irreducibly, the physics of collective relationships. A plasma cannot be well described by treating particles as discrete entities moving through a background field. Its behavior is dominated by collective phenomena such as Alfvén waves, magnetic reconnection events, Debye sheaths, current sheets, and filamentary structures that arise from the simultaneous mutual interaction of charged particles at every scale. The plasma doesn’t have properties so much as it enacts them through a collective process(es).
Hannes Alfvén, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1970 for his work in magnetohydrodynamics, was himself sharply critical of the tendency to privilege mathematical elegance over the messy relational reality of plasma behavior. He thought cosmological models built on clean field equations were systematically misleading about what cosmic matter actually does. (6) Alfvén was a physicist making a philosopher’s complaint, as well, that the abstraction has been mistaken for the thing.
A plasma is, ontologically, more like a watershed than like a Newtonian gravitational field. It has memory in the sense that it is encoded in its magnetic field topology, the way Lawson’s Fork has memory encoded in its channel morphology. It responds to disturbance through cascading collective reorganization rather than smooth field-theoretic propagation. It is constitutively far from thermodynamic equilibrium, as are living systems, sustained by the continuous throughput of intensive difference. The Alfvén wave is not a perturbation of a background field. It is the medium itself moving, doing something together, the way a flood pulse is the creek itself responding to what has happened upstream.
If ninety-nine percent of the visible cosmos is plasma, then the “clean” physics of particles and fields is actually the physics of the exceptional cases, such as the cold, dense, low-energy corners of reality where matter settles into the forms our terrestrial instruments first encountered as we experience. The cosmos is not, predominantly, a manifold of field values. It is predominantly a tissue of collective, intensive, durational process. Which is to say, it is predominantly something more like ecology.
Let me try to state the thesis clearly, because I want to be precise about what I am and am not claiming.
I am not claiming that field theory is false or that its predictions are unreliable. They are not. I am claiming, following Field’s nominalist license, that the indispensability of field descriptions for prediction is no guarantee of their ontological fundamentality. Field showed this for numbers. The same argument extends to the field descriptions themselves, I think. Fields are conservative about a more fundamental substrate they represent without quite reaching it.
That more fundamental substrate, I am suggesting, has the following features… it is intensive rather than extensive, durational rather than coordinatized, constituted by actual events of mutual encounter rather than persistent substances in a container space, and irreducibly place-specific rather than homogeneously law-governed. These are the features that Bergson recovers when he insists on duration against spatialization, that Deleuze recovers when he insists on intensity against extensive magnitude, that Whitehead recovers when he insists on actual occasions against the continuous manifold, and that Alfvén gestures toward when he insists on the relational complexity of plasma against the elegance of field equations.
They are also the features that ecology investigates. Not ecology as our current applied physics, as the working out of biochemical field gradients in living systems, but ecology as first philosophy and the study of how living systems constitute their places through intensive, durational, relational process.
What I encounter at Lawson’s Fork is not merely complex field theory. It is something ontologically prior to field theory as a tissue of encounters, each with its own duration, each irreducibly local, each constituted by the intensive differences that drive it. The watershed is doing what the cosmos is doing, at a scale I can stand beside and attend to. The cosmos is not, at its most fundamental level, a field. It is more like a watershed, with duration extending all the way down, an intensive difference expressing itself in process, place, and encounter.
That isn’t mysticism (maybe it is?). It is, I think, what physics is actually showing us, once we stop mistaking the conservation of the formalism for a description of what is fundamentally real.
(1) Hartry Field, Science Without Numbers: A Defence of Nominalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 1–30. Field’s central demonstration is that Newtonian gravitational theory can be reformulated using only relational predicates, betweenness and congruence relations among spacetime points, without quantifying over real numbers or other abstract entities.
(2) Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt, 1911), 1–45. The critique of spatializaton is developed most fully in Time and Free Will and Matter and Memory, but Creative Evolution gives the most direct statement of duration as irreducible to coordinate time.
(3) Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 222–261. The distinction between intensive and extensive quantity is central to Deleuze’s account of individuation and his critique of representational ontology.
(4) Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, corrected ed., ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978), 61–82. Whitehead’s account of the extensive continuum as derivative from actual occasions is developed in Part II.
(5) Michael Epperson, Quantum Mechanics and the Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 145–187. Epperson’s most concentrated argument for wave-function collapse as Whiteheadian concrescence is in Chapter 5.
(6) Hannes Alfvén, “Cosmology: Myth or Science?” Journal of Astrophysics and Astronomy 5 (1984): 79–98. Alfvén’s critique of mathematical cosmology in favor of plasma-based observational models runs through much of his later work, including Cosmic Plasma (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1981).
