RE: quantum field theories are problematic

From: Jesse Mazer <lasermazer.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Sat, 07 May 2005 20:52:32 -0400

Stephen Paul King:

>
>Dear Jesse,
>
> I thought that you knew that there are serious problems with all known
>forms of QFT!
>
>See, for example:
>
>http://www.cgoakley.demon.co.uk/qft/

Yes, I've heard there are some conceptual problems with them, questions
about whether the renormalization is mathematically well-founded, but
there's no getting around the fact that they make excellent predictions. Any
improved theory of quantum fields would presumably have to reproduce the
same predictions in the domains where they've been tested, and explain why
renormalization gives the right answers in these cases even if it isn't
really well-founded in general (the author of the webpage you cite seems to
want to just throw away renormalization completely and not explain why it
works so well in practice, which seems like bad science to me). Do you think
it's plausible that a theory involving a preferred reference frame would
reproduce the predictions of a Lorentz-invariant theory?

Jesse
Received on Sat May 07 2005 - 21:07:04 PDT

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