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