what I’ve just described was our understanding of electricity, magnetism and light in classical physics. Quantum mechanics complicates this picture, but without making it any less mathematical, replacing classical electromagnetism with quantum field theory, the bedrock of modern particle physics. In quantum field theory, the wavefunction specifies the degree to which each possible configuration of the electric and magnetic fields is real. This wavefunction is itself a mathematical object, an abstract point in Hilbert space.
