8 ms·

Something is wrong in the state of QED (2021) [pdf]

35 points by dilap 4y ago

dschuetz 4y ago
I have read only half of the paper and I feel like the author is holding a grudge or something. But, in general, I wonder why old papers (that are basically a foundation to other theories) are not critically re-reviewed to see if they still hold to scrutiny today? Hmm.
- staunton 4y ago
  Because why should anyone do that? It's not like you can publish that critical review. Sometimes the original authors grow old and write a book.
jjgreen 4y ago
Fabulous paper, I had no idea that Ramanujan's divergent series sum 1 + 2 + 3 ... = -1/12 is used in the derivation of the equation of the Cashmir effect! (p. 2, eq. 3)
- JadeNB 4y ago
  > Cashmir Surely just a typo, but, just to make sure, it's Casimir (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hendrik_Casimir)—nothing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hendrik_Casimir)—nothing to do with Kashmir (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashmir https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashmir).
  - jjgreen 4y ago
    Yes, of course (too late to edit that out now though), thanks
- wolfram74 4y ago
  I don't defend physicists mathematical laxity, we are very lazy, but I feel like we can't get dinged for something that came out of Ramanujan, he's solidly in the math canon. Arguing that we're using it out of context, maybe, but I've never heard his work should be considered unsound.
  - jjgreen 4y ago
    Sure, but I've always viewed Ramanujan's summation of divergent series to be a curio, I'd never have expected to see it turn up in physics. Pondering this a little, I think what disturbs me about this is the irreducible discontinuity it introduces. If you were to tell me that because of reasons, F = ma is wrong, it should have been F = m^{1.00000000001}a all along, then the resulting model of physics doesn't change that much; but if the Casimir equation should use ζ(-1+ε) rather than ζ(-1), then the sum is finite but as large as you like and the smaller that ε is, the larger this term is.
  - munchler 4y ago
    It's unsound because it assumes that a divergent series has a finite value. It's a kind of fanciful fiction, no matter who came up with it. In other words, if 1 + 2 + 3 + ... had a finite value, then that value would be -1/12. But it doesn't have a finite value, because it diverges. It's like saying that if pigs had wings, then they could fly. That's not something I'm happy to base physics on.
    - bmacho 4y ago
      It is not unsound, and it does not assume that a divergent series has a finite value. It is true, that on real numbers addition is an RxR->R function, and you can only add 2 numbers, and you can't add 3 or even infinitely many numbers. But then you can define an another function that can take a whole series as an argument, and call it addition too. You may forbid mathematicians naming another function 'addition', and talk about infinite sums, but then who cares. You can even die on this hill. Again, who cares.
    - Certhas 4y ago
      There is solid reasoning behind it though. Divergent perturbation series can be summed in a meaningful way depending on context. Eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borel_summation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borel_summation The mathematically sounds footing for this is unfortunately routinely not taught in undergrad physics.
      - 4y ago
staunton 4y ago
This paper criticizes renormalization as illegitimate but completely fails to mention the interpretation of renormalization that was given by Wilson and others (see "renormalization group" for details).
- quantum_mcts 4y ago
  There’s also earlier strict mathematical study of renormalisation procedure by Bogolubov and Parasyuk. QFT Green functions are distributions and their product is ill-defined, thus their naive use results in apparent infinities.
- cjfd 4y ago
  This interpretation of renormalization supposes that there is a more fundamental theory at a higher energy scale from which the quantum field theories arise. These then have an effective field theory which is evolved to the energies that are used in current experiments. During this evolving the non-renormalizable interactions go down but not the renormalizable ones which suggests an explanation why we only seem to need the renormalizable ones. However, if one starts out with the idea that something more fundamental exists at higher energy scales one has already proven that QED is 'wrong' in the sense that it is not a fundamental theory.
  - bawolff 4y ago
    > However, if one starts out with the idea that something more fundamental exists at higher energy scales one has already proven that QED is 'wrong' in the sense that it is not a fundamental theory. Isn't that a given for all physics theories? Nobody thinks that physics is 100% complete and we will never have a new and broader theory one day.
  - gmadsen 4y ago
    all physical theories are effective theories. Nothing is fundamental
forgotpwd16 4y ago
Previous (short lived) discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31431033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31431033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34873133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34873133
Laaas 4y ago
Discussion on weird subreddit about paper with author: https://old.reddit.com/r/BrilliantLightPower/comments/ffnnxw/something_rotten_in_the_state_of_qed/ https://old.reddit.com/r/BrilliantLightPower/comments/ffnnxw... Hydrinos took me down another rabbit hole.
A_D_E_P_T 4y ago
Scott Locklin recently (last week) wrote an effortpost about this: https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2023/02/19/anomalies-in-the-calculations-of-the-anomalous-magnetic-moment-of-the-electron/ https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2023/02/19/anomalies-in-t...
- bawolff 4y ago
  It is kind of hard to take someone seriously who is so obviously dripping with bitterness, ending their blog post with "Maybe some adventurous person outside the degenerate welfare-queen anglosphere will figure it out"
  - donnowhy 4y ago
    it's hard to stay positive when people used 'credential-based' reasoning to disregard your questioning/criticism; this is very standard in academia. and it's not like you can say "let's see who does better in the real products marketplace" with many of these research things (over 20 years before viable commercialization, if ever).
    - bawolff 4y ago
      > it's hard to stay positive when people used 'credential-based' reasoning to disregard your questioning/criticism; this is very standard in academia. Life is hard. Doesn't change the fact that a weird rant full of bitter ad hominems is almost certainly going to be ignored as being a crazy person wanting some sort of revenge.
- ajkjk 4y ago
  This is pretty kooky and bitter, probably not worth giving it much thought. Also he seems, and admits, that he is even less knowledgeable on the field than the people whose contrarianism he apparently takes a t face value.
Certhas 4y ago
Vixra is a huge red flag for those not aware. It means the research is so actively questionable that it's not allowed on the non-peer reviewed arxiv server. That's an extremely low bar to clear. There are a lot of crackpots on arxiv, you need something special to get kicked off.
- jjgreen 4y ago
  Also on arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.02078 https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.02078
- munchler 4y ago
  It's also worrisome to see a paper that's concerned with mathematical correctness using both commas and periods as decimal points interchangeably. See Tables 1 and 2, for example.
  - henrydark 4y ago
    Many countries use them the opposite of what you're probably used to, and it's hard to keep this in check when writing in a foreign language (in the author's case English). This isn't worrisome at all.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- Jcowell 4y ago
  Is it maintained by the same people or did someone just decide to reverse the arxiv name as an act of spite ?
  - ajkjk 4y ago
    Definitely not the same people. I think it's by someone who was bitter that 'mainstream' science didn't respect their crackpottery, or something like that.
- patrick451 4y ago
  This is straight up appeal-to-authority credentialism. What is actually wrong with the paper?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tptacek 4y ago
This was posted just last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34873133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34873133
gnramires 4y ago
I wonder: are there good reasons no one has tried to formalize QFT and the standard model up to an axiomatic mathematical model? I believe this would largely override any doubts and possibly point out to important inconsistencies in the theory. Can the theory give unique predictions (or unique distributions) for physical systems?
- gmadsen 4y ago
  Because it is hard and an active area of mathematical research. Which relates to the second question, yes, QED is the most accurate physical theory ever created and its unique predictions have been validated over the past 50 years. The issue is that physicists are a little hand wavy with mathematical formalism, so mathematicians are left trying to formalize , and that is worthwhile because of how effective it has been as a physical theory
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- movpasd 4y ago
  Mathematicians absolutely have been trying to formalise QFT for decades, with excellent success in many areas! Have a quick look at the nLab page for quantum field theory: https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/quantum+field+theory https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/quantum+field+theory . It is a complicated and hairy problem, and one that's frankly not even well-defined, because QFT can be approached from different perspectives. Often, this is done by using analogies with simpler quantum mechanical theories or classical field theories, but these end up not holding up to mathematical scrutiny when you try to implement them in a naive way. But this is really quite normal for mathematics. Nobody argues that quantum mechanics is poorly-defined, even though the quantum mechanics that physics undergraduates learn is certainly poorly-defined, and most physicists will never learn about rigged Hilbert spaces or know enough functional analysis to define it properly. This never results in any actual disagreements. All trained physicists will come to the same predictions if they start from the same assumptions, even if they don't know the strict, mathematical formalities. Definitional issues almost always arises because of infinities, and true infinities are rare in physics -- it's almost always just an approximation for "very big" or "very many". QFT has a lot of infinities. Quantum mechanics promotes classical theories with finite numbers of degrees of freedom into infinite-dimensional wave functions. QFT attempts to do the same, but with classical theories having uncountably infinite degrees of freedom. It's no surprise that there are definitional issues. And even if you have an axiomatic mathematical model, you'd be surprised how little added value that is to physics as a whole. It's certainly an interesting and important area of research, but the fact that it's ongoing doesn't somehow invalidate the predictions made using formal methods, because those methods are reproducible. Renormalisation isn't magic, it's just a set of rules that you apply, and in fact, those rules have a quite natural physical interpretation (in terms of bare vs effective theories).
bawolff 4y ago
The abstract sounds crack-potty tbh. "Suspicious coincidences" is a weird phrase. I didn't actually read the paper, but what could they possibly be arguing where "coincidences" matter. Is the accusation that they made up a fake theory that just happens to be right all the time?
zznzz 4y ago
A comment on some of the presentation of the history (‘staunton has already noted the strangeness of bellyaching in 2021 about renormalization without mentioning the renormalization group) In section 4.3 the author incorrectly describes Fermi’s comments to Dyson as a criticism of Dyson’s work on QED. At the time of this meeting, Dyson had already given up on his QED program and was working on the strong interaction. Fermi’s comments that Dyson had neither a “clear physical picture” or a “precise and self-consistent mathematical formalism” were regarding some (pre-quark) pion theory Dyson had been working at at Cornell starting in 1951, not QED. Dyson describes this meeting in https://www.webofstories.com/play/freeman.dyson/94 https://www.webofstories.com/play/freeman.dyson/94 but the required context is in the prior segment https://www.webofstories.com/play/freeman.dyson/93 https://www.webofstories.com/play/freeman.dyson/93 Also the author describes Oppenheimer’s initial resistance to Dyson’s work, but fails to mention that Oppenheimer was eventually convinced that Dyson’s work was valuable and gave Dyson a lifetime appointment at the IAS.
donnowhy 4y ago
this is what I've found to be most troubling around this whole debacle: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.10345 https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.10345 how can it be in any way 'scientific' to base results on unpublished material?? > The analytic results we accept as true are partially unpublished, and the people who did the original calculation are long dead. this ain't science, it's (American) imperialism applied through the cultural-institution of academia.
robochat 4y ago
The paper is written in scathing tones, by page 11 I was laughing at each new report of QED's 'perfect' agreement with whatever was the latest experimental result for the electron's anomalous magnetic moment although as it continued as far as page 14, it became sobering. However, the recent discrepancies are way down in the decimal points of the result now; when these calculations require 1000s of complicated Feynman diagrams and pages and pages of calculation, errors seem inevitable. My hope is that an alternative approach can be found that avoids these complicated calculations and in fact, researchers already seem to be working on this [1]. [1] Nima Arkani-Hamed - The End of Spacetime (Sep 2022) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GL77oOnrPzY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GL77oOnrPzY
- cjfd 4y ago
  Errors are not inevitable if these calculation are automized. And I would be very surprised if they are not.
  - staunton 4y ago
    Now they are. People (maybe 10 worldwide who care, I would guess) now discus disagreements of results (in some very low order decimal) due to software bugs in numeric integration code, most of which is not public... The situation seems hardly different except which decimal place they talk about. That's how this kind of science currently progresses.
- dilap 4y ago
  the fact that the calculations always seemed to be chasing the experimental result seemed the most damning thing to me i remember from physics undergrad a million years ago that great value was put on predicting new things -- you can always find a way to fit existing numbers! an epicycles vs ellipses kind of thing (but of course w/o actually being expert in the topic, it's hard to really know what to think)

35 points by dilap 4y ago

I have read only half of the paper and I feel like the author is holding a grudge or something. But, in general, I wonder why old papers (that are basically a foundation to other theories) are not critically re-reviewed to see if they still hold to scrutiny today? Hmm.

staunton 4y ago
Because why should anyone do that? It's not like you can publish that critical review. Sometimes the original authors grow old and write a book.

jjgreen 4y ago

Fabulous paper, I had no idea that Ramanujan's divergent series sum 1 + 2 + 3 ... = -1/12 is used in the derivation of the equation of the Cashmir effect! (p. 2, eq. 3)

JadeNB 4y ago
> Cashmir Surely just a typo, but, just to make sure, it's Casimir (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hendrik_Casimir)—nothing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hendrik_Casimir)—nothing to do with Kashmir (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashmir https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashmir).
- jjgreen 4y ago
  Yes, of course (too late to edit that out now though), thanks
wolfram74 4y ago
I don't defend physicists mathematical laxity, we are very lazy, but I feel like we can't get dinged for something that came out of Ramanujan, he's solidly in the math canon. Arguing that we're using it out of context, maybe, but I've never heard his work should be considered unsound.
- jjgreen 4y ago
  Sure, but I've always viewed Ramanujan's summation of divergent series to be a curio, I'd never have expected to see it turn up in physics. Pondering this a little, I think what disturbs me about this is the irreducible discontinuity it introduces. If you were to tell me that because of reasons, F = ma is wrong, it should have been F = m^{1.00000000001}a all along, then the resulting model of physics doesn't change that much; but if the Casimir equation should use ζ(-1+ε) rather than ζ(-1), then the sum is finite but as large as you like and the smaller that ε is, the larger this term is.
- munchler 4y ago
  It's unsound because it assumes that a divergent series has a finite value. It's a kind of fanciful fiction, no matter who came up with it. In other words, if 1 + 2 + 3 + ... had a finite value, then that value would be -1/12. But it doesn't have a finite value, because it diverges. It's like saying that if pigs had wings, then they could fly. That's not something I'm happy to base physics on.
  - bmacho 4y ago
    It is not unsound, and it does not assume that a divergent series has a finite value. It is true, that on real numbers addition is an RxR->R function, and you can only add 2 numbers, and you can't add 3 or even infinitely many numbers. But then you can define an another function that can take a whole series as an argument, and call it addition too. You may forbid mathematicians naming another function 'addition', and talk about infinite sums, but then who cares. You can even die on this hill. Again, who cares.
  - Certhas 4y ago
    There is solid reasoning behind it though. Divergent perturbation series can be summed in a meaningful way depending on context. Eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borel_summation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borel_summation The mathematically sounds footing for this is unfortunately routinely not taught in undergrad physics.
    - 4y ago

staunton 4y ago

This paper criticizes renormalization as illegitimate but completely fails to mention the interpretation of renormalization that was given by Wilson and others (see "renormalization group" for details).

quantum_mcts 4y ago
There’s also earlier strict mathematical study of renormalisation procedure by Bogolubov and Parasyuk. QFT Green functions are distributions and their product is ill-defined, thus their naive use results in apparent infinities.
cjfd 4y ago
This interpretation of renormalization supposes that there is a more fundamental theory at a higher energy scale from which the quantum field theories arise. These then have an effective field theory which is evolved to the energies that are used in current experiments. During this evolving the non-renormalizable interactions go down but not the renormalizable ones which suggests an explanation why we only seem to need the renormalizable ones. However, if one starts out with the idea that something more fundamental exists at higher energy scales one has already proven that QED is 'wrong' in the sense that it is not a fundamental theory.
- bawolff 4y ago
  > However, if one starts out with the idea that something more fundamental exists at higher energy scales one has already proven that QED is 'wrong' in the sense that it is not a fundamental theory. Isn't that a given for all physics theories? Nobody thinks that physics is 100% complete and we will never have a new and broader theory one day.
- gmadsen 4y ago
  all physical theories are effective theories. Nothing is fundamental

forgotpwd16 4y ago

Previous (short lived) discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31431033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31431033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34873133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34873133

Laaas 4y ago

Discussion on weird subreddit about paper with author: https://old.reddit.com/r/BrilliantLightPower/comments/ffnnxw/something_rotten_in_the_state_of_qed/ https://old.reddit.com/r/BrilliantLightPower/comments/ffnnxw... Hydrinos took me down another rabbit hole.

A_D_E_P_T 4y ago

Scott Locklin recently (last week) wrote an effortpost about this: https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2023/02/19/anomalies-in-the-calculations-of-the-anomalous-magnetic-moment-of-the-electron/ https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2023/02/19/anomalies-in-t...

bawolff 4y ago
It is kind of hard to take someone seriously who is so obviously dripping with bitterness, ending their blog post with "Maybe some adventurous person outside the degenerate welfare-queen anglosphere will figure it out"
- donnowhy 4y ago
  it's hard to stay positive when people used 'credential-based' reasoning to disregard your questioning/criticism; this is very standard in academia. and it's not like you can say "let's see who does better in the real products marketplace" with many of these research things (over 20 years before viable commercialization, if ever).
  - bawolff 4y ago
    > it's hard to stay positive when people used 'credential-based' reasoning to disregard your questioning/criticism; this is very standard in academia. Life is hard. Doesn't change the fact that a weird rant full of bitter ad hominems is almost certainly going to be ignored as being a crazy person wanting some sort of revenge.
ajkjk 4y ago
This is pretty kooky and bitter, probably not worth giving it much thought. Also he seems, and admits, that he is even less knowledgeable on the field than the people whose contrarianism he apparently takes a t face value.

Certhas 4y ago

Vixra is a huge red flag for those not aware. It means the research is so actively questionable that it's not allowed on the non-peer reviewed arxiv server. That's an extremely low bar to clear. There are a lot of crackpots on arxiv, you need something special to get kicked off.

jjgreen 4y ago
Also on arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.02078 https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.02078
munchler 4y ago
It's also worrisome to see a paper that's concerned with mathematical correctness using both commas and periods as decimal points interchangeably. See Tables 1 and 2, for example.
- henrydark 4y ago
  Many countries use them the opposite of what you're probably used to, and it's hard to keep this in check when writing in a foreign language (in the author's case English). This isn't worrisome at all.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
Jcowell 4y ago
Is it maintained by the same people or did someone just decide to reverse the arxiv name as an act of spite ?
- ajkjk 4y ago
  Definitely not the same people. I think it's by someone who was bitter that 'mainstream' science didn't respect their crackpottery, or something like that.
patrick451 4y ago
This is straight up appeal-to-authority credentialism. What is actually wrong with the paper?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

tptacek 4y ago

This was posted just last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34873133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34873133

gnramires 4y ago

I wonder: are there good reasons no one has tried to formalize QFT and the standard model up to an axiomatic mathematical model? I believe this would largely override any doubts and possibly point out to important inconsistencies in the theory. Can the theory give unique predictions (or unique distributions) for physical systems?

gmadsen 4y ago
Because it is hard and an active area of mathematical research. Which relates to the second question, yes, QED is the most accurate physical theory ever created and its unique predictions have been validated over the past 50 years. The issue is that physicists are a little hand wavy with mathematical formalism, so mathematicians are left trying to formalize , and that is worthwhile because of how effective it has been as a physical theory
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
movpasd 4y ago
Mathematicians absolutely have been trying to formalise QFT for decades, with excellent success in many areas! Have a quick look at the nLab page for quantum field theory: https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/quantum+field+theory https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/quantum+field+theory . It is a complicated and hairy problem, and one that's frankly not even well-defined, because QFT can be approached from different perspectives. Often, this is done by using analogies with simpler quantum mechanical theories or classical field theories, but these end up not holding up to mathematical scrutiny when you try to implement them in a naive way. But this is really quite normal for mathematics. Nobody argues that quantum mechanics is poorly-defined, even though the quantum mechanics that physics undergraduates learn is certainly poorly-defined, and most physicists will never learn about rigged Hilbert spaces or know enough functional analysis to define it properly. This never results in any actual disagreements. All trained physicists will come to the same predictions if they start from the same assumptions, even if they don't know the strict, mathematical formalities. Definitional issues almost always arises because of infinities, and true infinities are rare in physics -- it's almost always just an approximation for "very big" or "very many". QFT has a lot of infinities. Quantum mechanics promotes classical theories with finite numbers of degrees of freedom into infinite-dimensional wave functions. QFT attempts to do the same, but with classical theories having uncountably infinite degrees of freedom. It's no surprise that there are definitional issues. And even if you have an axiomatic mathematical model, you'd be surprised how little added value that is to physics as a whole. It's certainly an interesting and important area of research, but the fact that it's ongoing doesn't somehow invalidate the predictions made using formal methods, because those methods are reproducible. Renormalisation isn't magic, it's just a set of rules that you apply, and in fact, those rules have a quite natural physical interpretation (in terms of bare vs effective theories).

bawolff 4y ago

The abstract sounds crack-potty tbh. "Suspicious coincidences" is a weird phrase. I didn't actually read the paper, but what could they possibly be arguing where "coincidences" matter. Is the accusation that they made up a fake theory that just happens to be right all the time?

zznzz 4y ago

A comment on some of the presentation of the history (‘staunton has already noted the strangeness of bellyaching in 2021 about renormalization without mentioning the renormalization group) In section 4.3 the author incorrectly describes Fermi’s comments to Dyson as a criticism of Dyson’s work on QED. At the time of this meeting, Dyson had already given up on his QED program and was working on the strong interaction. Fermi’s comments that Dyson had neither a “clear physical picture” or a “precise and self-consistent mathematical formalism” were regarding some (pre-quark) pion theory Dyson had been working at at Cornell starting in 1951, not QED. Dyson describes this meeting in https://www.webofstories.com/play/freeman.dyson/94 https://www.webofstories.com/play/freeman.dyson/94 but the required context is in the prior segment https://www.webofstories.com/play/freeman.dyson/93 https://www.webofstories.com/play/freeman.dyson/93 Also the author describes Oppenheimer’s initial resistance to Dyson’s work, but fails to mention that Oppenheimer was eventually convinced that Dyson’s work was valuable and gave Dyson a lifetime appointment at the IAS.

donnowhy 4y ago

this is what I've found to be most troubling around this whole debacle: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.10345 https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.10345 how can it be in any way 'scientific' to base results on unpublished material?? > The analytic results we accept as true are partially unpublished, and the people who did the original calculation are long dead. this ain't science, it's (American) imperialism applied through the cultural-institution of academia.

robochat 4y ago

The paper is written in scathing tones, by page 11 I was laughing at each new report of QED's 'perfect' agreement with whatever was the latest experimental result for the electron's anomalous magnetic moment although as it continued as far as page 14, it became sobering. However, the recent discrepancies are way down in the decimal points of the result now; when these calculations require 1000s of complicated Feynman diagrams and pages and pages of calculation, errors seem inevitable. My hope is that an alternative approach can be found that avoids these complicated calculations and in fact, researchers already seem to be working on this [1]. [1] Nima Arkani-Hamed - The End of Spacetime (Sep 2022) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GL77oOnrPzY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GL77oOnrPzY

cjfd 4y ago
Errors are not inevitable if these calculation are automized. And I would be very surprised if they are not.
- staunton 4y ago
  Now they are. People (maybe 10 worldwide who care, I would guess) now discus disagreements of results (in some very low order decimal) due to software bugs in numeric integration code, most of which is not public... The situation seems hardly different except which decimal place they talk about. That's how this kind of science currently progresses.
dilap 4y ago
the fact that the calculations always seemed to be chasing the experimental result seemed the most damning thing to me i remember from physics undergrad a million years ago that great value was put on predicting new things -- you can always find a way to fit existing numbers! an epicycles vs ellipses kind of thing (but of course w/o actually being expert in the topic, it's hard to really know what to think)