Where does field collide?

In physics a field assigns a physical quantity to every point of space and time, so that the field is the value spread across space rather than any object sitting in it. Faraday pictured the space around a magnet as filled with lines of force, and Maxwell in his 1865 A dynamical theory of the electromagnetic field gave those lines an exact form, treating the electromagnetic field as a set of quantities defined everywhere and governed by equations. The referent is a value at every point, measured in physical units, and it holds whether or not anyone is present. This is a field in the most literal meaning, and it shares nothing with the social and psychological meanings but the word.[1]

Unit

A physical quantity valued at every point of spacetime

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Field strength read in physical units at each point, such as volts per metre or tesla

For Bourdieu a field (champ) is a structured social space of positions, defined by the distribution of a specific kind of capital and by the struggles agents wage to hold or improve their place. In The social space and the genesis of groups (1985) and The field of cultural production (1993) he treats domains such as art, law, or science as relatively autonomous arenas, each with its own stakes, where a position takes its meaning only from its relations to the others. The referent is a domain of social competition, not a region of physical space, and what fills it is agents and capital rather than a measurable quantity. It borrows the spatial image from physics but names something entirely social.[2][3]

Unit

A structured space of social positions

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Mapped by multiple correspondence analysis of agents' capital and positions

In Lewin's field theory behaviour is a function of the person and their environment taken together as one momentary whole, the life space. In Defining the "field at a given time" (1943) and Field theory in social science (1951) Lewin held that only the forces present for the person at a given moment can explain their behaviour, and he drew the life space as a region crossed by vectors of attraction and repulsion. The referent is one person's psychological situation as they experience it, not a physical value and not a social arena. Lewin took the word and the mathematics of the field from physics deliberately, but his field is one mind's world, not a quantity in space.[4][5]

Unit

A person's momentary life space

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Reconstructed from a person's momentary situation as they perceive it