01 Preface What Is A Field

01 — Preface: What Is a Field?

Plain English

A field is not one physics thing in this stack. It is any continuous quantity stored over space that other systems read and write every tick:

• GPU images (Phi, Thermo, Flow)
• A 64 MiB guest RAM die on the GPU
• JSON telemetry describing network flows

A program is a recipe. A field is the state of the kitchen — heat on every burner, not just the timer.

Three field families

Family	Where	What it stores
GPU analog fabric	Vulkan bindings 8–10	Phi, Thermo, Flow
Field Die	FieldX86Die SSBO binding 1	x86 guest, VGA, tile cache
Packet field	NEXUS field jsonl	TX/RX, ports, corroboration

Key terms

• Binding — Vulkan slot where a buffer or image attaches
• FieldSocket — Per-dispatch push-constant control block
• Holographic boundary — HDR frame pair + fabric; where rendering pays thermodynamic cost
• Operator — The human at the keyboard. Not the daemon. Not the shader.

Status labels (used throughout this manual)

Label	Meaning
✅ Implemented	In source; you can grep it
🎭 Metaphor	Poetic naming; useful intuition
📖 Philosophy	Operator discipline, not a measured constant
🎨 Visual	Shader art, not instrumentation

What this manual is not

• Not a substitute for reading headers (Pipeline.hpp, FieldRtxFieldAbs.hpp)
• Not a promise that every poetic name maps to SI units
• Not cloud security — everything here is local-first

Next: 02 — Fields: From Pixels to Packets