Everything is Fields: How Quantum Field Theory explains what you, me and the Universe are made of

by David Tong, Dr David Tong

At the most fundamental level, you are made not of particles or forces. You are made of fields.

These strange, fluid-like entities stretch across the universe. What we call particles are ripples in them. What we call forces are fields responding to those ripples. Even empty space is not truly empty, but alive with restless quantum activity. This is the startling vision revealed by quantum field the most successful, most fundamental and least understood framework in modern physics.

In Everything is Fields, Cambridge theoretical physicist David Tong gives readers a dazzling, accessible and often very funny guide to this extraordinary idea. Quantum field theory is usually considered the hardest subject in physics, yet it underpins our deepest description of the Standard Model. It explains electrons and quarks, light and magnetism, the strong and weak nuclear forces, the Higgs boson, antimatter, atoms, materials and the early universe.

Along the way, Tong brings to life the scientists who uncovered this hidden structure of Faraday imagining invisible lines of force, Maxwell discovering that light is a ripple of electromagnetic fields, Dirac predicting antimatter, Feynman taming infinities and Higgs revealing the field that gives fundamental particles mass.

The result is a profound, landmark work of popular science which finally brings quantum field theory to a wide readership and describes everything from the smallest subatomic particle to the dynamics of the entire universe.

Kindle Edition

Expected publication March 16, 2027

About the author

David Tong is your average Malaysian guy - down-to-earth and handsome. Bread and buttered at the King George Vth. School, Seremban after the WWII, he was thereafter trained as a teacher at the Kirkby College in Liverpool, England. In addition to a number of years as a teacher of English as a second language, his background encompasses sales and marketing, and general and agency management.

Now retired, David spends most of his senior years laughing over both old and new jokes, believing that laughter is certainly good medicine for his bones. When he is not laughing in his sarung at his home in Kuala Lumpur, David can be found sipping teh tarik at his favorite mamak stall, making quirky remarks and spinning frivolous kopitiam years with his cronies.