On 7/18/2012 9:34 PM, john wrote:
> Well, wow.
> So many 'fields' and so
> Little knowledge!

Quite a lot of knowledge. You should read up on them!
The "so little knowledge" applies to you -- evidence: you did not even
know the catalog of fields, which is WIDELY KNOWN and has been for a
long time -- and not to people comfortable with them. Don't assume that
because you don't know something then it isn't known.

> What are the differences between
> the 2 dozen fields?

Quite a bit, but it takes time to catalog them. They fields have
different symmetries, which govern the laws that control their behavior.
The propagating disturbances in these fields also have different
properties, such as quantum mechanical spin, spatial parity, whether
they are bosons or fermions, rest mass, etc. These are all jargon terms
and they must be learned, but it is useful to do so because they do very
precisely describe what the differences are between them. It is not
really possible to describe these differences in everyday language,
because the definitions found in dictionaries for everyday words do not
capture really what they mean in physics. So you HAVE to learn to extend
everyday language and learn the meanings of these words in order to
understand what the differences between the fields are.

> 
> Why does a certain particle only
> react to a certain field and how?
> How is a field produced?

Fields don't get produced. They are everywhere all the time. What gets
produced are disturbances in the field. Those are produced by
disturbances in other fields. This isn't unusual. A propagating
disturbance in air (like a gust of wind or a shock wave or a sonic wave)
can generate a propagating disturbance in set of miniblinds (like a
ripple that runs up the set or a collective vibration at the resonance
frequency of the blinds). These are ordinary occurrences seen in many,
many situations.

And fields are not produced by particles. Particles ARE fields.
EVERYTHING is fundamentally quantum fields, even those things that we
used to describe as something different like "particles".

> 
> Hell, let's get right down
> To it- what is charge and how
> does it propagate?

Charge is a property like momentum or energy. Properties are not made of
some kind of stuff. They are just properties. Charge is the property
that connects one kind of field to other kind of fields. Asking WHY this
field connects to that field is a little like asking WHY momentum is
conserved. Momentum is only singled out as a property of physical
interest exactly BECAUSE it is conserved. There are lots of other
properties you could imagine (like "odorificiousness", related to mass
and velocity by (1/9)mv^3) which don't appear in any physical laws
because they don't have any interesting behaviors that would make them
stand out. In other words, we wouldn't have even come up with the word
"momentum" unless there was something physically interesting about this
property, the fact that it is conserved. It's an observation that
there is something interesting about this behavior, like it's an
observation that DNA exists. Asking WHY this behavior is interesting
is like asking WHY DNA exists.

Likewise, we make the observation that different kinds of fields
couple to each other. It is an interesting property that they do. It is
precisely the degree to which they couple that we label "charge". This
is different than the meaning of charge you may have in your head. Maybe
you think of it as some kind of stuff that lives on electrons and
protons like a coating or an ingredient. It's not. It's your older
concept that isn't right, and so the right thing to do is to DROP that
concept and start thinking about charge (and momentum and energy and
other properties) in a new way. This is hard for some people. They want
to try to relate things in terms of their old concepts. Not a good idea.