How are these puzzles to be resolved? The original Newtonian scheme of particles certainly needs to be supplemented by Maxwell’s field. Can one go to the other extreme and assume that everything is a field, particles being little finite-sized ‘knots’ of some kind of field? This has its difficulties also, for then particles could vary their shapes continuously, wriggling and oscillating in infinitely many different kinds of ways. But this is not what is seen. In the physical world, all particles of the same species appear to be identical. Any two electrons, for example, are just the same as
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