system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What qualities of quantum fields account for their differences?

My understanding of quantum field theory is that all particles are now seen to be disturbances in a field - the electron field, the electromagnetic field (photon), the gluon field, and so on. To me this sounds like saying that everything is made of one *kind* of stuff: a field. But the way these fields behave seem very different: one is influenced by massive bodies, one is influenced by charged particles, disturbances in one produces one kind of particle, another produces a very different kind of particle. But isn't a "field" just a number assigned to every point in space? What qualities do fields have that produce such different behaviors? How can a field be said to be different than another field, other than its strength at a given point in space?
gpt
Each field has different properties than the others. For example, different spins. The photon field is a vector field, the Higgs field is a scalar field, the electron field is a spinor field, the graviton field is a tensor field, etc.

So at the very least, particles with different spins/parities cannot be said to come from a single field.

Then each kind of particle has its own mass, and its own couplings to the various other fields. It wouldn't really make sense to say that these are all the same field, at least not without altering the formalism in some way.