Quantum Fields

"*Quantum carburetor? Jesus, Morty, you can't just add a sci-fi word to a car word and hope it means something. Huh, looks like something is wrong with the microverse battery.*" -Rick Sanchez

Quantum Fields are at the heart of Elementary Craft. This is not just because they sound cool and look fancy: they are the start of your adventure. There are seven different types of quantum field blocks, with difficult (and much more boring) names:

Matter particle fields:

* Upquark field
* Downquark field
* Electron field
* Neutrino field

Carrier particle fields:

* Photon field
* Gluon field
* Weak field

Upon mining, each quantum field block gives you elementary particles, because you provide energy to it. The quantum field block itself does not break, and can be mined without limitations. The quantum field blocks could be divided into two categories, the quantum fields that create matter particles, and the quantum fields that create force carrier particles. The main difference is that the former particles are the fundamental building blocks of ordinary matter that we are familiar with, while the latter are particles can be thought of as messenger particles that exchange forces between those matter particles.

In general, mining one of these quantum blocks will spawn particles corresponding to the field. There is one exception: if a quantum field is mined with a tool that is enchanted with silk touch, the block drops itself. This allows the player (that's you!) to move the quantum fields around. Therefore, if you really want to, you can build a house out of neutrino fields - that's probably the only thing they're useful for.

## Dive deeper into the Physics: Quantum fields

You might think that quantum fields are made up, another instance of putting the word "quantum" in front of everything. But quantum fields actually do exist; just not in the simple form presented in Elementary Craft.

Quantum fields are ubiquitous in the universe. Although you cannot see them, they stretch throughout space and time. In quantum field theory, every elementary particle is a parcel extracted from a field. At any place in the universe, a particle can arise from or disappear again into the field. As an analogy you can think of a snow carpet (the field) from which you can extract snowballs (the particles). When you throw the snowball, the particle is displaced through space. When the snowball hits the ground and breaks, the snow is incorporated into the snow carpet again.  The snow analogy was in 2 dimensions. As an analogy for our 3 dimensional reality, you can think of the field as a room full of fog. You can compress the fog into little clouds, which would be the particles. In the image below, the yellow and blue patches are the particles that are condensations within the field.

Every elementary particle, such as an electron, is a parcel extracted from a quantum field. There are 24 quantum fields. 12 fermion fields that give matter particles, And 12 boson fields that give messenger particles. The 24 fields are:

- The 6 quark fields (upquark, downquark, strangequark, charmquark, topquark, bottomquark)

- The 3 charged leptons (electron, muon, tau) and the 3 neutral leptons (electron neutrino, muon neutrino, tau neutrino)

- The 8 gluons (because of 8 possible color combinations), those are the bosons of the strong interaction

- The 2 weak gauge bosons (W and Z)

- 1 photon, that's the electromagnetic boson

- 1 Higgs boson

There is a distinction between **matter** particles and **messenger** particles. You can consider matter particles as the actual building blocks of matter. Whereas, the messenger particles ensure that the forces are transferred between the particles.