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@dang: Could we get a title change to "How Renormalization Saved Particle Physics"?
by Shoop 6y ago
@dang: Could we get a title change to "How Renormalization Saved Particle Physics"?
- lacker 6y agoIt's interesting, you can see in the URL that at some point the article was named "How Renormalization Saved Particle Physics". My guess is that an editor changed it to make it more comprehensible / clickbaity.
- davidkuhta 6y agoI found it less click-baity and more a sly reference to the perception of the theory by its contemporaries (particularly Feynman in his QED book): "…is technically called ‘renormalization.’ But no matter how clever the word, it is what I would call a dippy process! Having to resort to such hocus-pocus has prevented us from proving that the theory [...][...] is self-consistent. It’s surprising that the theory still hasn’t been proved self-consistent one way or the other by now; [...][...] What is certain is that we do not have a good mathematical way to describe the theory of quantum electrodynamics: such a bunch of words…" - Feynman, QED 1985 kudos to /u/acqq for the links in their comment.
- dang 6y agoSure.