QED isn't perfect, agreed. But I think there's an unjustifiable gap in the chronology of your presentation, and this omission severely damages the claims of your argument. You skip the crucial developments of the 1970s and 80s. First, it was shown by Glashow, Salam, and Weinberg that QED is an effective field theory, an approximation of the electroweak theory that's only valid in a limited range of energy scales. Second, and perhaps more importantly, there's the more general work of Ken Wilson who discovered the physical rational behind renormalization. He showed that renormalization, rather than being a method of hand-waving infinities under the rug, was a completely justifiable mathematical technique which reflected how the phenomena of field theories are organized by scale. Renormalization doesn't just work for QED, it works for higher energy theories like QCD and the electroweak theory, but it also works for the lower energy systems of condensed matter. (Try telling a condensed matter physicist to stop using renormalization, and I guarantee it won't end well) My point is this: Because your presentation doesn't take into account the more modern view of renormalization and of QED as an effective field theory, it comes across as an insufficient and misinformed suspicion towards a list of coefficients. Yes, the numbers disagree. But only at the 10th decimal place ! You really need to emphasize how tiny that is, and then dive into all the many possible complicated factors that could account for those tiny discrepancies, before you advocate we ditch QED. EDIT: For those interested, the resources that helped me with some of these ideas are Polchinski's TASI notes "Effective Field Theory and the Fermi Surface", David Tong's notes "Statistical Field Theory", and the 8th lecture from Tobias Osborne's advanced QFT course uploaded to RUclips entitled "Watch this first! Advanced quantum field theory, Lecture 8". I hope those help
@@mrgadget1485 Agreed. I could see the argument that he's aiming for a lay audience with no mathematical or physics background, so he's telling a second-hand compressed version of the events that can be found in books like Schweber's QED and the Men Who Made It. But even as simplified history, it's unjustifiably truncated to the point of being a deliberate biased omission. He gives numbers from experiments that happened within the last 10-15 yrs, but leaves off the development of theory at 1952, thereby giving the impression that quantum field theorists have been doing nothing but resting on ignorant laurels for 60+ years.
@@mrgadget1485 Judging from the titles and thumbnails of his other videos, I suspect See the Pattern is another advocate of the "Electric Universe". If so, this is a little rare for this crowd. They usually rant about cosmology and plasma astrophysics. They're always emphasizing electricity (as if actual astrophysicists never mention it😆), but they rarely focus on its quantum foundations. It's interesting but also worrying that some of them are now turning their attention towards QED.
@@mrgadget1485 I'd like to see those ancient myth-centric arguments, which EU advocates usually reserve for astronomy, but used in videos about QED. 😆 Like: "As you can see from these Egyptian hieroglyphics about Amon Ra creating the world, the ancients obviously knew about quantum vacuum polarization and the Schwinger effect. How else could you possibly account for these vague blobs? Tesla was right!!!"
@@theamith788 Thank you. A comment made by truebaran later in the day made another very good point. This video presents the story as if the whole thing is a conspiracy. The story even has the trappings of a "secret government plot" by pausing on the Manhattan project, which had nothing to do with the development of QED. (If anything the Manhattan project delayed the advance of QED. Radar was far more influential to the relevant science.) But all of these problems are well know in the field if you do your research. And the resources are all as freely available as this very video.
This is sweeping a bit under the rug why renormalization is "wrong", or rather, why you shouldn't just discard all current theories based on a lack of knowledge. It is not that it is a lie, but rather that it needs more insight and restructuring just as any other previous model in science. The fact that renormalization results in agreements with experiments is simply a hint that more insight is needed. My PhD thesis was somewhat related to this and I feel it's important to understand that nothing we have currently is set in stone.
What percentage of PhD doesn't offer nothing new to Physics? 99,9 %? Congrats: you'll work for someone who hasn't any degree and, be sure of that, does not care at all.
@pyropulse The paradign shift begins with understanding that all forces are electromagnetic in nature. SAM explains this for the strong and weak forces, and Zhang et al demonstrates that gravity can be explained by what could be called Van der Waals forces at a distance. Of a more speculative nature is the notion that the electron is the source of both positive and negative charges, presumably through different patterns of motion or vibration. The concept is not so radical as it might initially appear when one considers the nature of magnetic poles, or of electrified parallel wires, both of which demonstrate attractive/repulsive behavior due solely to the movement of negatively charged electrons.
"Others gave talks to show how to do the calculations, while Schwinger gave talks to show that only he could do it." I laughed out loud at that, well put Oppenheimer
If you have started to walk in the wrong path.. you cannot hop to right path .. because you are are still walking on the wrong path thinking some day you will be able to reach the right path... If you have started at the right path and got diverted to the wrong path then you can go back to the right path and start again.. its like a tree.. if the roots and the stem is wrong how many branches the tree has it will still be wrong.. but if your root and stem are right ... and some of the branches are wrong then you can cut off the wrong branches and then new branches will grow again (According to biology--- propagation) ...which can or maybe able to define the right and correct path.. and correctly hold on to the idea or theory based on results.. When the pillars are weak the house will soon fall if you keep on building things on the top of it
@@ethankhadka1143 I couldn't disagree with you more. Perspective's a fickle thing. Peripeteia happens all the time. We all must help with open ears if we hope for the same from others.
I dont want to sound mean, I like that the author did a lot of research to do this video. However large parts are quite misinformed because it is looking on QED from 70 year old viewpoint and some points are mixing different unrelated things together. Most, if not all, these "issues" and discrepancies in theory are now well understood and resolved. QED is not incomplete or ill defined and Schwinger, Tomogana and Feynmans aproaches are all valid. And most importantly: Physics is not based on 50 year old quotes, many of which are out of date or out of context. What needs to be understood is that f-diagrams are not magic. They are simply graphical representation of series expansion of evolution operator. This is mathematicaly riggorous. What is also well understood now is that these series will diverge due to mathematical properties of Taylor series, essentialy this expansion neglects quantum tunneling. We know for example QED will give you better and better results until terms of power of roughly 137, then terms start to diverge. Exact solution to QED equation of course does not suffer from this problem but is much harder/impossible to obtain. It has also been said "coupling constant for fermions is greater than one, therefore Dyson series diverges". This is simply not true. Coupling constant of what? Which field? Coupling constant for QED is always 1/137 (+running of course). It is low energy QCD and other high energy QFT where couplings are strong. Then you cannot do Feynman diagrams and have to rely on different, usually numerical aproaches. Later author introduces muon g-factor. The he claims on the screen that there are two contributions to g value, that is g from QED and g from nonQED. In that g nonQED he introduces g from electroweak interaction. Electroweak interaction is just generalizastion of QED, it contains both QED and weak interactions so this is either misspeak or misunderstanding. What is also misunderstanding is that he then compares muon g factor and electron g factor and claims they should be the same? No, they shouldnt. Actualy discrepancy of experiment and theory for muon g factor is the biggest window into physics beyond the standard model we currently have. So its not like anytime there is discrepancy we just "modify" theory results to make it fit. Quite opposite, we celebrate anytime experiment does not match theory because that is the possibility to discover something new. Today the g-2 precision is up to 10^-10 or so for almost 20 years. There is no discrepancy. Experiment (2006) can verify this up to fifth order, higher orders are too small to be measured. Also, renormalization and regularization are perfectly fine. You expect infinities in theory which has interaction of 1/r, that is not surprising. I could go deeper here but that would be too long. Hope this helps.
Finally somebody commenting on this video who knows what they are talking about! I saw one commentator compare the perturbation series in QED to rearranging divergent series in calc 2, which is completely ridiculous. Most people who take issue with things like this don’t understand the concept of an asymptotic series.
I don't like the way you presented this issues-like if it were some sort of a conspiracy theory. You didn;t mention Wilson's work which gave conceptual reason for renormalization-you quoted Dirac, Feynmann and so on, which were brilliant but some time has passed since then and now we understand things better than in the fifties. Saying that renormalization is just ignoring the infinities is definitively not saying the whole story: there is a plenty of work about nonperturbative renormalization-for example the recent fields medal was awarded to Hugo Duminil Copin for showing (among other things) triviality of phi^4 model. There are lectures on IHES youtube channel about this. Renormalization techniques are used in the theory of the so called regularity structures which has plenty of application in stochastic partial differential equations (see the work of Martin Hairer and his collaborators). There is a very rich structure behind the renormalization techniques, the so called Hopf algebra of rooted trees and more general of Feynman diagrams-see the work of Connes and Kreimer. Even more, there is some universal group behind the renormalization which was conjectured by Cartier and found in the work of Connes and Marcolli (the so called Cosmic Galois Group). This clearly shows that we understand SOMETHING about renormalization. Do we understand all that can be understood? Of course not, QFT is very tricky buisness but nobody is pretending that there are no problems: it is a shame that you are presenting these issues like if everybody was hiding something. I read just a little bit about these things in Folland's excellent book ,,Quantum Field Theory: A Tourist Guide for Mathematicians'' and nobody is pretending that QFT is well defined mathematically. Everything is stated clearly: that first you need to get rid of infinities using renormalization but even after that the series which you obtain are believed to be divergent (for some of them this is actually proved). It is not the case that these issues are not recognized: in fact, one of the Millenium Prize Problems deals with constructing QFT rigorously. What I liked in your video is that it serves as a nice summary of the complicated history and highlights how the brighest people are confused about there extremely complicated problems-sine the nature is far more complex that we could imagine
This whole thing feels like the professional equivalent of a high school lab class, where students fudged with values to get outcomes like those expected. very weird to see
My theory is after WW2 they intentionally made fake physics in order to confuse mainstream Americans, Europe, Russia and China. This way only the rich elite would have the real physics, similar to how only the silicon valley has Ai nowadays. But my guess is physics went astray long before that, when they gave up trying to explain the MM null result and Einstein invented spacetime, which is like a weird and nonsensical version of aether. Spacetime is like a non-substance yet somehow produces waves. Anyway, people keep talking about the standard model and quarks, but it just seems like something somebody just made up so they could keep their job. If someone can explain to me why quarks are definitely real I'll listen, but I want to see a photo of a quark before I believe it. My assumption is a real theory of physics will come from hobbyists, they are less incentivized to make up random theories. Because if an experiment at the LHC was useless, the LHC cannot just say the data is useless because they have to justify LHC expenses, they will always hype it up and claim that progress is being made.
@@earthenscience It's not too unrealistic. Physics became very militarized after WW2, partly due to the A-bomb. I can see how some nefarious mind might want to obfuscate real physics with endless approximate calculations, which seems like the basis of much modern theory like QED, QCD etc.
"Quantum mechanics is the idea of the absurd"? I can't think of a reason to listen beyond that first sentence. This channel is for people who don't want to know mathematics and are willing to sound stupid to people who do. PLEASE stop thinking that your ignorance is intelligence. It isn't.
For a theory allegedly built on a lie it’s funny how we have developed working quantum computers. Or we could just wipe the slate clean go back to the cozy shelter of Newtonian classical physics, and forget all this ever happened.
This is very interesting. In another field of study, this would be called "curve fitting". I've always admired Feynman, but after seeing this, I have the impression that Dyson is the most honest of all these guys.
I just see physicists doing their best with a very difficult calculation. Experiment and theory mutually reinforce each other, and the convergence to a finite value points to a weakness in the math (the lack of a good theory of renormalization), not in the physics. Feynman revolutionized the calculations, but didn't change QM or QED.
@@PhilFogle I only partly agree with you. There may well be a weakness in the mathematics, but you have not shown that. There may well be a weakness in the physics (by which I mean the model), but you have denied this without any sort of proof or evidence other than current strong agreement between model and observation. This is only circumstantial evidence, no matter how strong the agreement. This then becomes a question of belief, not fact. My belief is not in the model, nor in the mathematics. I believe that we do not yet know the truth. I am undecided as to whether we ever will. I agree that the mathematics with its renormalisation oddities has been startlingly accurate, or so I've been told. But so was the geocentric model of the universe before the heliocentric model took over and fixed some of the inaccuracies. Science seeks always to improve its models, I hope, or replace them with better models. To do less is a failure of science.
It is common knowledge that Dyson debunked qed. Only fools have perpetuated it's so called accuracy and success. Qed might have the most accurate prediction regarding the magnetic moment (there is evidence that the experiment was bogus as well) but it also gives the worst prediction ever, (e.g.,the vacuum catastrophe).
It is no wonder Dyson did not get the Nobel price: he was honest. Thank you Dr Consa for the great detective work on QED. Thank you for making this video. The theory is more or less a 'prince of darkness'.
sad they need to use virtual particles to complete their equations lol. tesla said it best.. “I consider this extremely important,” said Mr. Tesla. “Light cannot be anything else but a longitudinal disturbance in the ether, involving alternate compressions and rarefactions. In other words, light can be nothing else than a sound wave in the ether.”
@@zetristan4525 Dyson was the principle author of QED, he turned it into a theory, not Feynman, and he proved eventually that the theory can only spit out infinite values after renormalization to finite mass and charge. Exit QED, which was the reason not to give a Nobel to Dyson.
@@koenraad4618 I love Dyson and his more honest path through physics, but isn't this a bit extreme?: QED is still a very accurate prediction scheme, even if not presented as a conceptually-sound theory. eg I don't believe in the existence of virtual particles, but I can still make great use of the Dyson series for experimental predictions, even tho I truncate the series at a (conceptually) ad hoc term. I've asked mathematician friends if they can recast the asymptotic series as a convergent series, but they've found that too daunting a task.
I've brought up in conversation this topic and this specific paper online around a year ago and was getting a lot of heat and people attacking me, but very little substance in their arguments. Glad to see you giving it more exposure.
The probabilities of the wave function adopting real values cannot be generalized in a presumed continuum of real numbers, so infinity is considered the analytic domain of the probable measurements. Dividing by infinity means that you get "one" by integrating a real measurement, and "zero" by the integration of everything else, all the other probabilities. If you have measured a value in this way, you cannot spread it out in proportion to any other measured quantity. So you get a unit circle as the domain of a specific measurement. From there the Hamiltonian is just a nerdy way of doing linear algebra on the quadratic sesquilinear forms of abstract algebra, which are nothing more than abstractions of the geometrical construction of conic sections. This is why Clifford algebras were disdained by the smartest gentlemen in the room, and Maxwell, Gibbs, and Heaviside and their whizkid devotees preferred to obfuscational complexities which make the problems seem so complicated. They are not complicated, so much as combinatorial, a fact which is literally hidden behind walls of numbers, the use of which as coefficients is entirely a matter of initiation into the arcane rites of academic pomposity. Now we have followed the rebirth of mathematical physics from their Hellenic pyres, by decorating the Sphinx with so much glitter and obfuscational notational and conceptual nonsense that the bird cannot fly a single metre without a multimillion dollar computational facility. The Rococo Period has bloomed, heralding the ongoing decline of the Empire, the corruptions of scientific institutions being merely symptomatic of the inevitable march of history over the graves of armies.
We must learn to differentiate Science (which can only be made about PRESENT here and now) and Mythology which are subjetive interpretation. Scientific methos is about Experiments and Observation. e.g. Double-Slit Experiment and interference patterns are Science. The Copenaghen or the Many Worlds Interpretation are Mythology!
Besides from the fact your video is almost reading his paper verbatim, did you not think to check his credentials? He's not listed on his affiliated university's website, his papers aren't published in any reputable journal, and his work is clearly amateur. Case in point, look at his paper Electron Toroidal Moment: where he uses images without captions or citations (some of which are just from Wikipedia), his equations and values are not properly formatted, and he uses non-relativistic formulae for dealing with the electron orbits.
Thank you. This video, and the paper it cites, continually quote old misunderstandings of renormalization which have long been corrected since the 1970s and 1980s. Red flags were raised for me after I didn't hear a single mention of "effective field theory" or "renormalization group". Not that those would answer the numerical discrepancies , but they are so minuscule. And he offers no investigation into the many factors that could explain those tiny discrepancies before he's willing to ditch QED just because all those coefficients look confusing.
It is interesting that Julian Schwinger after a good deal of chicanery, ignoring Dyson's critique, was effectively dismissed from Harvard, as his genuine creativity came into question. Yet many purport to calculate the anomalous electron magnetic moment to great accuracy, while ignoring the atrocious instability of the Standard Maxwell-only electron. I don't care how accurate they claim the QED anomalous magnetic moment is, it doesn't prove that QED is on sound footing.
During grad school, my advisor ALWAYS pointed out all this mess. The theory he was (is) developing for which I contributed a little bit was founded in differential geometry and looked quite promising. I hope it leads somewhere.
"which I contributed" Yeah, you contributed to the "paradigm shift in physics", of course... congrats, you are the 27th in this comment section, lol So much shifting... :D
@@TheChzoronzon Huh? wtf's wrong with you and your reading comprehension skills, my triggered friend. I said I contributed a little to the theory this guy is developing, no more no less.
@@magtovi And I congratulated you ... if you think that's a sign of "triggering" you must be projecting something, my mate :) Now, the mere fact that you think the partial and tricky exposition of supposed flaws that have been resolved decades ago that is this vid has any merit, shows you aren't much up to date, neither your advisor
@@talon1313 gonna quote another post, if you don't mind...I'm as lazy as you " First, it was shown by Glashow, Salam, and Weinberg that QED is an effective field theory, an approximation of the electroweak theory that's only valid in a limited range of energy scales. Second, and perhaps more importantly, there's the more general work of Ken Wilson who discovered the physical rational behind renormalization. He showed that renormalization, rather than being a method of hand-waving infinities under the rug, was a completely justifiable mathematical technique which reflected how the phenomena of field theories are organized by scale. Renormalization doesn't just work for QED, it works for higher energy theories like QCD and the electroweak theory, but it also works for the lower energy systems of condensed matter. (Try telling a condensed matter physicist to stop using renormalization, and I guarantee it won't end well)"
As a student I always felt I was crazy looking at all this mess and wondering why it was so convoluted, so epicyclical. But I chalked it up to only having a surface level understanding. But as I’ve looked at it more and more since graduating college in 2000, the more it felt like Kuhn was right, and these guys, brilliant as they are, were maybe not wrong, but at least missing substantial portions of the big picture. I don’t think we’ll get a major new shift in technology like what occurred with integrated circuits until this mess is better sorted out.
@Hectic Narcoleptic Yes, he must wear a tinfoil hat, because anyone so irrational as to question any aspect of quantum mechanics must be a lunatic who also thinks aliens are using electromagnetic fields to manipulate their brain waves. Is that what you mean to imply with your tired cliche "tinfoil hat" remark? Do you also think Dirac and Dyson must have worn tinfoil hats, for daring to question some of the very same conclusions reached by their scientific peers?
It's not a mess. It has a very specific and well-defined mathematical structure. You could take some graduate-level courses in group theory and differential geometry, to get to a place where you could _even begin_ to understand it. But hey, better to be a big fish in a small pond, right? It's the Steven Seagal way to live.
@Hectic Narcoleptic Sorry, the comment you replied to was gone by the time I commented. Yours showed right after the main comment, so I mistakenly assumed you were replying to that, because I didn't read the "@Code Tech" part. My bad!
Emilio Segrè, in his book From X rays to Quarks, states at the end of his chapter on QED: “once in a while one sees theories that become fashionable for a few years and then fade away, leaving some partial results of permanent value. In any case, this is not a new situation in physics.”
At 14:43 , it is not "in the case of fermions" that the coupling constant is greater than one. It's in the case of QCD at low energies. This is why we don't use Feynman diagrams for QCD at low energies, we use it at high energies.
NO IDIOT MATHEMATIC WAS ALVAYS HERE WE INVENTED JUST Language to write it.. and this video is BS without any evidencer justz another idiot who dont understand thins..
You've got that backwards: multiverse of metamathematics, observer selecting tangible reality out of that which by definition must support the evolution of said observer, our Universe.
Maybe. As a hypothetical, what happens if we do discover an alien artifact or transmission (possibly same thing), and after correcting for symbology and base numbering scheme resulting from differing number of appendages, it turns out that they arrived at pretty much the same mathematics millions of years before we had evolved?
Physicist should humble themselves a bit and read Charles Proteus Steinmetz - Electrical Discharges Waves and Impulses. It would clear up much for them.
When they showed me renormalization techniques I remember calling bs on them. The more I studied the more bs I saw. It is amazing to me how other physicist learn to fool themselves into thinking there is nothing wrong with renormalization and quantum mechanics as a whole.
My QED teacher was religiously obsessed with the theory. He had the mental state of a Jehovah's witness stating that it is the most precise and most proven theory in the history of mankind. Well, he accomplished something for sure. He made me disgusted of the self-pleasing nature of theoretical physics. You could say that I frowned on it because I was bad in it. That is also true for sure. On the other hand I am convinced that I was bad in it because it made so little sense to me. I am able to grasp the working of any machine or natural phenomenon once I get the whole picture. On the other hand I see only dogma and mind-gymnastics when mathematical perversions are presented as the absolute representation of reality.
The derivation of quantum mecanics itself with shrodinger wave equation and heisenberg uncertainty analysis with relativity twin paradox gives me a sens of doubt that we should repeat everything starting fron newton and maxel equations
I found this fascinating! I will say, My dad was educated by Feynman - and spoke of Him often. I just want to correct the pronunciation of "Feynman..." It is pronounced "Fine man."
Feynman is an angliziced name from German Feinmann /fainman:/, but the Yiddish pronounciation is /feinman:/. As Feynman was Jewish, one would guess that the Yiddish pronounciation would be correct, but in English-speaking America it is easy to simply pronounce his name Fineman /fainmæn/, which is also the literal English translation of the name.
@@Ottmar555 funnily enough when i was listening to my audiobook of Feynmanns life he would always make fun of philosophers as they spoke their "mumbo jumbo" and "argued over a simple definition". He made some great contributions to physics but I think he clearly had an air of superiority over other disciplines.
@@shutupimlearning That is sadly the state of Physics, in general. An air of superiority for their heavy use of mathematics, but most of them are idealists (in the philosophical way) and have strayed from grounding their work in empiricism. I think the natural sciences need to incorporate the basics of philosophy and sociology/psychology into their framework to become more effective. There is a reason for the stereotype of the smug STEMlord looking down on everyone else while being ignorant about social issues.
Many videos explain how QED works. It's refreshing to see one on how it doesn't work. And informative as to how science and progress get along. Thank you.
@3:22 "So expensive was their equipment that it made it almost impossible for the rest of the international scientific community to perform the experiments". In other words: "Trust, and do NOT verify." Half a century later, and that same principle still applies... because, LIGO and LHC, anyone? To paraphrase comrade Stalin: "I consider it completely unimportant who in the [scientific community] will [operate one-of-a-kind experimental setups], or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this-who will [present the unverifiable results], and how."
I have a PhD in Quantum Physics (University of Manchester, 1998) and graduated alongside Prof Brian Cox. Looking back, it staggers me, that 25 years later, people are still "researching" the same little niche area I worked on in the mid-1990s. Most of this research has achieved nothing meaningful, yet people have dedicated their entire lives to it. I am so glad I left this behind and focused on something more practical and real.
Time is a compactified dimension. This forces renormalization as we exist on a single sided surface. Surface(cos(u/2)cos(v/2),cos(u/2)sin(v/2),sin(u)/2),u,0,2pi,v,0,4pi Passing over infinity places one in the inverted region of the single sided surface. Two regions separated by a node of maximal density.
You missed Lise Meitner and Kristian Birkeland regarding Manhattan project, Birkeland who first (as far as we know) suggested the splitting of atoms in a letter sent to a business family, who later accepted Lise Meitner to continue her research at their facilities after she fled Germany during WW2. Meitner had direct ties to people involved in the Manhattan project, as well as the family's business who Birkeland took part in founding.
What we are doing here is asserting the current QED is a theoretical description of Lepton-Lepton or Lepton-Hadron interaction. It could be if someone could construct a proper Quantum Field Theoretical (QFT) model. The closest we get is Feynman, which by the way is used for all sorts of particle interactions quite successfully so has some merit. The aforementioned QED formula is what in physics we call an *"EMPIRICAL"* formula. As such it involves matching free parameters (the α's coefficients) in a polynomial to experimental measurements. There is nothing "rotten" or "suspicious" about this and Feynman is right and admits its not 100% correct. No one is claiming it is theoretically sound. To illustrate consider Kepler's EMPIRICAL laws of planetary motion,;which ere very good at determining the orbits of the planets and moons etc. It took the theoretical genius of Issac Newton to construct a single Universal Law, based on Kepler's work, and with a sound mathematical framework, which was later improved on by Einstein. The ultimate answer to all this is an extension to the Standard Model from QFT, who knows maybe String Theory or Supersymmetry will give us this. It is fundamentally wrong to rubbish a beautiful and successful model just because someone made an arithmetical error. I finish by restating Michio Kaku's observation: "If you think my model is wrong, you come up with a better one"!
Only value of a theory is how precisely it can predict and be used for applications. For those who expect to find an exact theory describing reality, are up for a big disappointment.
What's your point? This video is a well made, detailed history of science. If you disagree with parts of it, why not tell us what they are and give some references to support your case.
@@alanparker3130 I disagree with the part where he calls his “history of science,” “QED is rotten at the core” all because he doesn’t know how renormalization works or what an effective field theory is. It’s deceptive to draw in viewers at best
@@Cosmalano True..I seems so many people don't get just cos we find out more doesn't change the truth / validity of previously proven scientific theories..Itt just gives us a more encompassing picture 😁☮️
@@claudiaarjangi4914 Scientific theories are never proved. They are only disproved or shown to be consistent with observation. Proof in science does not exist.
as a biology (MCB [so like microbiology and biochemistry]) major I find it kinda funny how much faith y'all put into some of these hypotheses. in the field I'm studying assumptions are challenged and knowledge is updated constantly. perhaps the fuzzy and hard-to-define nature of a lot of biological data was a blessing in disguise- we tend to put a lot less faith in whatever our current hypotheses are than perhaps other STEM fields.
You don't remember the claim that foreign microbes, of the microbiome, outnumbered our own cells by an order of magnitude, based on one individual's faulty intuition? Or that siRNA would bind to the anti-codons of an mRNA virus to block replication, until it was realized that the siRNA destabilized the virus? Or the ridiculous 19th Century paradigm of race that held for at least a Century, until the 2020 Paper, "Recovering Signals of Ghost Archaic Introgression in African Populations"? My first undergrad, Math/CS, so only applied Math like Partial Differential Eqs. Laplace Transform and Convolution Integral, Numerical Analysis, etc. Undergrads 3 and 4 in the Biological Disciplines and there is far more rigor in the Hard Sciences than the Soft Sciences. Yet the Math can only elucidate what MAY be happening. Then the Empiricists must design the terribly expensive hardware prove the Math even though Mathematically validated, actually correlates with Reality.
Don't worry: I'm pretty sure most physicists realize that we haven't even begun to grasp the basics of how things really work. All we see are approximations, the shadows on the wall of reality, so to speak. However, we're at the point that we can mostly tell what we miss, which is a great achievement. But the more I learn about physics, the more I realise we don't know anything of the basics. Even at the scale of Einstein things are hard to grasp. The consequences of a fixed speed of light are already quite strange.
Seems like curve fitting to me. Dirac was right in his concerns. Also, what an outrageously brilliant imagination Dirac had to obtain the revelations about QM, Special relativity and spin and anti-matter.
This video is wrong for several reasons. One reason is that QED is a perturbation theory just like standard (non-relativistic) quantum mechanics; in fact in this theory the perturbation calculation is used, for example, to obtain the corrections for the fine structure of the hydrogen atom or for the Zeeman effect. So whoever says QED is wrong must say the same about quantum mechanics. Now tell me, do you have an alternative theory that explains the microscopic world just as well?
Seems like this comment section brings together people who fail to understand physics. Tip: learn the renormalization group in the context of statistical mechanics first, then go back to QFT.
I think it's understood that all of QM is some approximation of a broader theory that describes the universe. That ultimate theory may or may not be mathematically tidy, we all assume it will be, but at the end of the day the job of science is to give us a model of reality that accords with reality, not a mathematically elegant model with reality and experiments being secondary. You have a mathematically elegant model and it doesn't accord with reality, you change the model. We got very lucky that we somehow cobbled together QED in such a way that it turned out to be the most accurate model in all of science (and it still is that). But the issue of renormalization is sufficiently front and center that it appears in even many popular accounts of QM. The math of renormalization is head scratching, but it works and it's not an entirely arbirtary process. [Also, minor point, but Richard Feynman pronounced his name "Fine-man" rather than "Fayn-man".]
Because the more Feynman diagrams you solve the more accurate the result. The problem with the infinities is they need to be curtailed at some point for obvious reasons ...but if you could somehow solve infinitely many Feynman diagrams you would get the true coefficients. ...but we can't. The infinities shouldn't be there so we've got something wrong, but Feynman was hooked into _something_ with them... It's a shame no one else has glimpsed the same thing, perhaps we'd get a different intuition on it and different maths.
@@trudyandgeorge Your missing the point. When they calculated the 2nd coefficient, it was magically close to the experimental value at the time. Then new experiments were made and the experimental value changed, and then it so happens that now you need a 3rd coefficient. If the math being done was honest then the theoretical value would not fit the experimental data until enough coefficients were calculated and the experiments were good enough. Just like the crisis in cosmology. That's honest work. Fine tuning is just faking out results so you can keep getting grants.
Similar situation in the discovery of the neutrino. Reines and Cowan announced that they experimentally matched the theoretical neutrino cross section, only to later have the theory change on them. Then they retrofitted their experimental data and assumptions to match to the new theoretical cross section. And Pontecorvo (the inventor of the oscillating neutrino) was hilarious in his "dog ate my homework" physics in order to save his CL-37 proposal for neutrino detection.
Having an accurate representation does not mean the representation suddenly magically becomes the thing itself. A shadow accurately represents the outline of a thing, but we do not ever confuse a shadow with the thing itself. We are engaging with QED in THE basic philosophical error, pointed out by Plato in his cave analogy.
My problem with current physics theories is related to this but not exactly the same. We are taught that these “laws” are well-known…so much so that high school physics teachers think what they are teaching is gospel. Add this to the condescending attitudes put forth by physicists when they are talking to someone outside their field and you have the perpetuation of things that are demonstrably incorrect. Even at national labs, physicists put forth the idea that others simply don’t understand what they (the physicists) do understand…to their own detriment many times. We’d be much better off simply explaining that our models are what they are…just equations that allow us to predict the certain aspects of the future given specific properties of the present. It can still be a search for understanding and ultimate knowledge…but without the pretense.
True. Only European scientists before the 20th century were studying nature to get to know the truth, now it is just fancy mathematical models that try to 'confirm' to experiments and give certain predictions but do not describe nature what so ever.
14:40 I believe you mean "in the case of mesons" instead of fermions. The latter is particles following the Pauli exclusion principle (they have half-integer spin). Leptons are subject to the electromagnetic force for which the coupling constant is the fine structure constant, approximately 1/137 i.e. smaller than 1. Mesons are also subject to the strong nuclear force, for which the coupling constant is around 0.117. Great video, the historical context is very important and would be improved with sources and dates for the quotes in particular. For example, Schwinger did not participate in the Manhattan project. And although he worked with Oppenheimer, and Bethe helped him secure a scholarship at Columbia, Schwinger was appointed at Purdue in 1941 i.e. before the Manhattan Project started. In 1948 and 1949, Schwinger published three papers (Phys. Rev. 74.1439, 75.651, 76.790) expanding on his 1947 paper mentioned at 8:19.
I am imagining the conversation you guys had.... "if we always call him feign man instead of fine man" it will make it seem like.... I am imagining it because if you are dishonest in that way... there arent any ways that you are unwilling to be dishonest
Feynman *himself admitted he was talking out of his ass* about the anything that involved the fine-structure constant: _There is a most profound and beautiful question associated with the observed coupling constant, e - the amplitude for a real electron to emit or absorb a real photon. It is a simple number that has been experimentally determined to be close to 0.08542455. (My physicist friends won't recognize this number, because they like to remember it as the inverse of its square: about 137.03597 with about an uncertainty of about 2 in the last decimal place. It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it.) Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to pi or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It's one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the "hand of God" wrote that number, and "we don't know how He pushed his pencil." We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don't know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out, without putting it in secretly!”_
Admitting that I cannot truly absorb much of the intricacy of this presentation. But I can and do believe that a premise exists in physics that is like fudging on a cake. Underneath the immaculate topping lies a rough and uneven surface. It is a cover that is required to make the cake look good. I think Stephen Crothers of the Electric Universe will enjoy this. I think it's all about maintaining the status quo.
Ana Maria Cetto and Luis de la Pena have shown that stochastic electrodynamics (SED) can be shown to emerge from zero point field theory and is consistent with QED. So a proper derivation of magnetic moments should be done based on zero point field interactions.
Gee, wonder why physics has been stuck for fifty-years? Studied QED independently in grad-school and despite proclamations to the contrary, it had no discernible fundamental basis; no derivable principles. Ran away from it after a semester or so.
This presentation completely overlooks the work on positronium based on the Bethe-Salpeter equation which provides another test of QED Fulton, Owen & Repko PRA,4 1971 as well the hyperfine Muonium structure Fulton, Owen & Repko PRL26, 61 ,1971
I'm sooo happy you've made a video about this story and this paper. Back when it came out it made me lose my innocence regarding the state of modern physics and I finally understood why I couldn't ever stomach studying even a bit of QED. It turns out the funny smell was an indicator of its rot indeed. BTW there's a "naught" missing at 19:00 ;)
go do math instead. i studied some basic physics and couldnt stomach it either. they manipulate derivatives as if infinitesmals exist, and do all sorts of other dodgy stuff that anyone with a math background will scream illegal. in math i haven't encountered anything dodgy during my time at uni, there's a lot of hand waving sure but if you spent time you can figure out the rigorous details.
@NRGY i dont know, i hear QED use a lot of functional analysis, and lie groups. im not versed in either, but they seem easy enough from the wikipedia pages.
Considering how natural the taurus field is in nature, it almost seems like the answers that led to infinity were more on the right track and we just lack the vision to see how so, or maybe to say, we're not giving enough thought into the process and its variables, and too much thought on an expected outcome.
@@laryxislust6664 I mean, for example the number 3̅ is infinite: ...333.0 Makes sense to me, at least, but apparently it's not a rational number. I don't know what arithmetic rules apply for such numbers; how you can calculate stuff with them. Maybe by using some p-adic system. I'd love to hear a mathematician's opinion on that.
@pyropulse I have a physics PhD from certain UC, and I'm a little dubious that they, whoever they are, meant that. And the video is crap. Despite all the runtime on the history of QED, it somehow leaves out most of it in favor of an ultra focus on renormalization, but even in that topic it leaves out any inconvenient information. In any event, you're free to criticize QED all you like, but realize this is well treaded ground. And 40 years later it's still agreeing extremely well with experiments, well beyond just the g factor. You'll need to account for why that is.
13:51 - N. David Mermin coined the phrase "Shut up and calculate!" to summarize Copenhagen-type views, a saying often misattributed to Richard Feynman and his QED theory.
We actually did work out the deeper mathematical process underlying renormalization. Read up about renormalization groups, specifically in the work of Bogolyubov and Wilson. Certainly there are mysteries and problems with QED but this is no longer one of them.
Renormalization is squeezing a square into a circle. It's approximate but close. This is what Dirac's magnetic moment is to the anomalous magnetic moment. Squeezing a square into a circle. An approximation.
I was afraid at first that this was going to be another crackpot video saying "I spotted a flaw in the math, therefore my crazy idea is correct!" Instead I was treated to a very interesting video on the history of QED, documenting all the suspicious coincidences in the calculations.
Firstly, fantastic video; you've really done your research and explain the problems met by both theoretical and experimental physicists. Ultimately, I consider the reproducible experiment to be king and many physicists have shattered their minds in understanding the strangeness of nature. Bell's inequality and traversable wormholes are two I would cite. In talking about Schwinger and Dyson: Schwinger calculated a critical limit called the Schwinger limit at which point the equations of QED become non-linear. Maxwell solutions don't simply add together like two inserting beams of light. Rather non-linear QED causes particle production. One place in the universe where the electromagnetic field strength is above the Schwinger limit is around a neutron star which is key to me because in talking about fractal geometry and non-linear dynamics in the context of baryogenesis and QED. However, experiments producing field strengths exceeding the Schwinger limit are few; though I do have one in mind. Now certainly, it is no secret in the physic's community that the standard model of particle physics is not the final answer. Muon-G2 experiment being an example or measurement of the weak nuclear force in the mass of the Z and W Boson or how many quarks are in a proton, never mind the diameter of the proton. One thing I have growing confidence in is Alpha, the fine-structure constant, that is the fractal dimension of everything.... though how to test that against the Superverse in seeing its fine structure constant becomes the question. Got to love the Dyson expansion.... I'll need to dig up his paper on perturbation. Ah Chaos.
The superverse? Lol I remember making this word up, the superverse, as a joke in trying to group ever larger structures trying to see how big we can make the list.
Superverse is the application of the entire mandelbrot set, not only what's physics. We can also have paraverses, independent sentences playing in the same address space and time, and multiverses, sentences where infinite injuction from one state can influence another without causality.
The video is a bit inaccurate. While 'shut up and calculate' is often attributed to Feynman, it is a misattribution. (especially if you know how feyman is actually more interested in understanding than calculations). Also 13:46 Fermis criticism was directed at Dyson for a different proposal.
@1:30 not a good start. Pretty hilarious of you to claim QED precision is based on only one empirical value. Talk about gross rhetoric.What about all the other experimental values of lesser precision but which are far more accurate than any other theoretical framework? All the atomic spectra, the Lamb shift, the magnetic moments of other particles, scattering cross sections, it's a tonne of data. None of it says QTF is correct, but they are all measures of incredible empirical "success". (Caveat: I do not think QFT is fundamental, fwiw, but I don't go around claiming it is accurate only based on one type of measurement like you loony tune.)
@4:20 spin is not really a "property of the fermion". It is a symmetry, the spin number labels a representation of the symmetry group. The spinor is not "the particle" rather the spinor is an instruction for translating laboratory coordinates onto the rest frame of particles. So any rotational symmetry in the system (for anything, not just elementary particles) has to have an operator for rotations, in the geometric algebra these are rotors. They are classical geometry, nothing "quantum" about them. Thus however is Dirac Theory grossly misunderstood when dumb-dumb physicists blindly reading textbooks attribute the geometrical rotor transforms as a mysterious internal symmetry of the particle itself. David Hestenes and colleagues have a much better framework for understanding spinors. Spin-1/2 is present in classical physics already, as the way a (classical) rotor itself transforms under another rotation.
Distegarding infinities is a common mathematical technique. Look up „principal value“ or „removable singularity“. There is nothing mysterious about it. Renormalization is nothing else. It may have been mysterious when Feynmann atarted it, but nowadays we understand this problem. So no, QED is not based on a lie, this video is.
Good example of how measurements that don't suit people are disregarded. Now repeat the Bedford experiment. Much much simpler and anyone can do it and should be done to see how there's ZERO earth curvature in this supposed ball we live on.
I love that this is what qualifies as deep and dark and rotten to the core among the physics community... I would that our politics were this innocent.
Right?! These people were adjusting their theories to match the experinments. Maybe they were missing parts of the big picture, but damn I wish politics and most things worked like that. The world would be a better place if people adjusted their beliefs and methods based on experimentation and reality, not the other way around.
The theory is accepted today as the best theory. It is an effective theory which is able to predict well and agree with the results of experiments. Of course further research can bring about a more general theory that also encompasses QED. If we do away with QED what is there to replace it?
Excellent presentation, the information is conveyed efficiently and in a straightforward way. I wish more videos on the subject were done this way, instead of being filled with the usual tenuous analogies and speculations and profound, ponderous questions that are dramatically posed and then go unanswered.
There is a very powerfull alternative of QED, that does not explain the anomalous electron magnetic moment but: spontaneous emission coeff, simulated emission/absorption coeff and more spectacularly the Lamb shift. This is a back to basic electron shell model, with transition current governed by a charged conservation law (the electron moves from one state to another) leading to the single photon electromagnetic field. This theory has been well developed by Roger Boudet in 2 textbooks. It is incredibly solid and consistent. The idea is SIMPLE: electron flows from state 2 to state 1, a transition current is created, then a non zero vector potential is created according to selection rules (spherical harmonics integral) and the single photon electromagnetic field expression is obtained. Computer the power radiated divided by ils energy and you have spontaneous coefficient of Einstein with a PERFECT dérivation. Truely amazing.
So, to sum up, how i understood it: take two arbitrary constants in physics, then calculate rough coefficient of correlation between them.. and then as you see they diverge due to increased precision of experiments, use a power series with arbitrary coefficients to fit the results together.. Yeah, that sounds legit (sarcasm)
You weren't doing too bad until you called the coefficients "arbitrary." They are not at all arbitrary. They just required decades of work by brilliant researchers and computer algebra systems to solve the equations that reveal their values.
@@erikkeever3504 seriously? take any two values, compute correlation between them in power series. reevaluate if you get new experimental data of more precise new values. Where you need brilliancy in such simple and blunt approach? Where are solid proof that these two values are actually correlated? This is where you need brilliancy. And without it, its just a poor-man's attempt to fit experimental data into things you 'feel' they should. And of course, then you can sell it as 'quantum theory are most precise area of physics'.. yeah. sure. using 4th power series fitting.. of course it gonna be precise. no way it wouldn't :)
@@erikkeever3504 Is that physics? We data doctored(as we called it) in an engineering environment, trying to predict things in a known range. It was great fun, but I didn't think those in theoretical physics did it that way.
Another possibility: We are working with alien technology we don't understand. QM, QED, Relativity and the Standard Model are just very elaborate versions of the Cargo Cults of Borneo in WWII.
The main point argued on the video :The renormalization procedures on QED , so the whole QED as a QFT , is flawed because the calculations do not match with experimental values on the g-electronic factor calculations . The conclusion is wrong . The HIGHER ENERGY renormalization scheme in quantum field theory appears to be well understood from a mathematical point of view(thanks to people in Axiomatic and Constructive Quantum Field Theory which have shown us that quantum fields are not operator valued smooth functions but operator valued DISTRIBUTIONAL objects ) .However to implement the renormalization procedure in CALCULATIONAL SCHEMES may be very , very problematic ,leading to discrepancies in the results , IN MY OPINION . For instance , dimensional regularization, THE MOST IMPORTANT ONE , still remains not justified from a mathematical point of view ! . By the other side , analytical regularization scheme is mathematically well defined .But nobody uses it !.Note that all the calculations pointed out on the video were done in the dimensional regularization scheme . Another point to be raised and related to calculations in QED is that photons are massless .So one introduces a photon mass by hand on the radiative corrections calculations and vanishes it at the end of calculation . This could be sources of calculational problems , if not taken with utmost care as pointed out in the Bogolioubov- Shirkov treatise who do not use the dimensional regularization scheme (even at the light of the block nordisieck "theorem" which says it is no problematic ) . It could be interesting a mathematical regularization with a massive photon preserving gauge invariance .Finally , the most secure renormalization CALCULATIONAL scheme is that presented on the vol2 of Bjorken Drell text book implemented directly on the original QED set of Dhyson equations (a very complicated combinatorial recursive procedure ) .But surely ! .Renormalization on QFT and related matters is far to be completely well understood .
If the QED calculation paper is presented to the Physics department it gets a Nobel Prize. If the same paper was presented to the mathematics department it would get zero marks, in red pen.
Actually the problem in physics is that it has been invaded by mathematicians and their mathematical tools being forced into metaphysics. Most of these people in these useless theoretical physics departments are completely clueless about real physics and a lot of those practitioners in these departments have a pure mathematics background. Some of them think physics is applied mathematics making it very clear they have no clue what physics really is.
@@michaelpieters1844 The fundamental problems in QED are all physical. Those in the theory department who are dealing with them understand that level of physics just fine, even though you do have a point that some theorists are not very good with foundational issues.
This was my "breakfast" this morning and what a feast it was! Wal has mentioned the renormalization problem in his inimitable style. You have put meat on this explanation! Bravo to you both! Thank you.
I don't think any high energy physicist regards QED as THE theory, because the whole point of renormalisation is that we do not know the physics below some small scale, that is why we integrated it out. That is, we acknowledge that our theory is incomplete and it does not work below some small scale (or above some energy scale), so we only consider degrees of freedom below that energy scale. I don't see what's wrong with this procedure, at least in principle. In practice, renormalisation is a very complicated process so mistakes are bound to be made. But that is a different criticism than saying that our entire paradigm is wrong.
@@brendawilliams8062 Incorrect. There are right and wrong answers as to how the universe works. If some people spend a century being wrong, they're scrubs, not geniuses.
I wouldn't quite say this because even in classical mechanics calculations can get messy really fast. We are just custom to the thought experiments there the equations are smooth and the systems are not too complicated so we can easier understand the basics
D.L. Hotson wrote an interesting essay about Dirac a while back, Dirac's Equation and the Sea of Negative Energy. After reading it I was compelled to agree with Dirac that it's very strange and improper to just sweep these inconvenient infinities out mathematical models with tricks.
This reminds of Ptolemy's geocentric system. It was very complex with its math and constantly made adjustments to agree with the visible motion of the planets. All because it was looking at the whole thong in the wrong angle. Describing something with math doesn't mean that's the way it actually is. It seems to me they need a better theory, looking at it from the right angle.
I still find it facinating that the self-energy of the electron is divergent in both Classical and Quantum Electrodynamics. The correct answer to this problem could be as revolutionary as Planck's invention of his little "h".
Quantum calculations will give results that have forms like (bare electron charge)x(infinite correction)x(finite value). In renormalizing one effectively says "those first two terms equal the _measured_ electron charge, so I'll just remove infinity times something that can never be measured and replace it with what I know it to be, q_e, and move on." Which takes us to, "shut up and calculate" and why renormalization is so philosophically unsatisfying.
@@frenstcht It's not (obviously) incorrect, so much as an admission that there is an aspect of the theory that is clearly incomplete. Consider the electric charge of an ion solvated in water... The measured value will be much lower because of screening by the surrounding water molecules' dipole moments. The bare (say) positive charge polarizes the negative O ends of the water to point towards it and they screen it away. Unless, that is, you look closely enough (= at short length scales = at high energies) to see the bare ion. By measuring both we know e.g. that water screens away electric fields by a factor of about 80. In QFT it is the vacuum - the haze of virtual particles - itself that is polarized. The corrections to the hypothetical bare electron charge must be carried out up to infinite energy, because the hypothetical "bare" electron is a point particle (of zero length = infinite energy). The obvious measurement problem c.f. measuring the bare ion charge is that zero length is NOT experimentally accessible. What the infinite result says is that at high enough energies the vacuum is infinitely polarizable. We know (or at least think) this is wrong, but with no available experimental guidance that would tell us what the correct infinite-energy theory _is_, renormalization is saying "we don't know what is going on at infinitely short length scales that creates what we at large scales call a point-like electron. But we can recognize what would, in the correct non-divergent theory, correspond to that, so let's replace that with the known value." I hope this explains the renormalization "hack" a little better. Normally these sort of problems, which are called ultraviolet divergences, go away when a particle is found to be a composite which provides a cutoff length/energy scale. No integration to infinity, no infinities. But the only known plausible cutoff for the electron is at such a high energy - the GUT scale, around 10^18 GeV - that it's forever inaccessible. And there is a huge amount of calculus machinery that enables integrations to/around infinity. To stupidly gigantic finite values... Not so much.
@@erikkeever3504 Wow...okay. thank you for taking the time to add that explanation. That does add a lot! Thank you so much for that reply! And this is why ever bigger colliders are such a big deal, I'm guessing, because of the energies involved. Thank you again!!!! Happy New Year!
When our test equipment and mathematic are more advanced than our understandings behind observations, here comes, SR, GR and the quantum mechanics. Those ideas helps us in “how” but “why”. Those are law but science. Prior to Sir Isaac Newton, science is driven by behavior modeling and were reduced to numerical model. That is OK to advance our technology but science.
Thank you for the video, and especially for the linked paper, which summarizes all the relevant research. I'm do glad I didn't choose particle physics, and went into applied semiconductor physics instead. There are no infinities in my research, and everything is mathematically consistent.
I'm working on it; I'm not paid, I'm not formally trained, I am not adequately equipped to perform these equations; yet, this is my natural element. I run the numbers somewhere in my head, I can see it working, I can view these results, though I lack words, labels, analogues; woe and lament as I might over my lack of formal training, I know these are scientific, I recognize Science anywhere, I can repeat these measurements; I simply must broadcast my finding, somehow, some way.
For the college I go to in undergrad, quantum mechanics is a 2 semester sequence. In your first semester, you learn basically every quantum mechanics problem you can solve with exact precision. Every other quantum mechanics problem has to be solved using methods like perturbation theory to approximate solutions so that’s what the second semester was all about. If you limit yourself to only solving problems to exact precision, there really aren’t very many physics problems you can solve. The ability to get accurate approximations as well as methods of generating error bounds on those approximations are in some ways even more useful than methods which determine exact solutions because far more problems can be solved using the former than with the latter.
What a fantastic video. Dyson is really an underrated physicist. I think ultimately Dirac is right, but we have to admit that there was a lot of validation of the theory. The correctness of a theory is likely not merely the result of experimental validation but rather a combination of clarity, simplicity and mathematical self consistency which also agrees with experiment. The example which comes to mind is the geocentric theory, which also by the way does agree with observations and obeyed “some” kind of mathematical laws as well… Anyway very relevant questions here !
QED isn't perfect, agreed. But I think there's an unjustifiable gap in the chronology of your presentation, and this omission severely damages the claims of your argument. You skip the crucial developments of the 1970s and 80s. First, it was shown by Glashow, Salam, and Weinberg that QED is an effective field theory, an approximation of the electroweak theory that's only valid in a limited range of energy scales. Second, and perhaps more importantly, there's the more general work of Ken Wilson who discovered the physical rational behind renormalization. He showed that renormalization, rather than being a method of hand-waving infinities under the rug, was a completely justifiable mathematical technique which reflected how the phenomena of field theories are organized by scale. Renormalization doesn't just work for QED, it works for higher energy theories like QCD and the electroweak theory, but it also works for the lower energy systems of condensed matter. (Try telling a condensed matter physicist to stop using renormalization, and I guarantee it won't end well)
My point is this:
Because your presentation doesn't take into account the more modern view of renormalization and of QED as an effective field theory, it comes across as an insufficient and misinformed suspicion towards a list of coefficients.
Yes, the numbers disagree. But only at the 10th decimal place ! You really need to emphasize how tiny that is, and then dive into all the many possible complicated factors that could account for those tiny discrepancies, before you advocate we ditch QED.
EDIT: For those interested, the resources that helped me with some of these ideas are Polchinski's TASI notes "Effective Field Theory and the Fermi Surface", David Tong's notes "Statistical Field Theory", and the 8th lecture from Tobias Osborne's advanced QFT course uploaded to RUclips entitled "Watch this first! Advanced quantum field theory, Lecture 8". I hope those help
@@mrgadget1485 Agreed. I could see the argument that he's aiming for a lay audience with no mathematical or physics background, so he's telling a second-hand compressed version of the events that can be found in books like Schweber's QED and the Men Who Made It. But even as simplified history, it's unjustifiably truncated to the point of being a deliberate biased omission. He gives numbers from experiments that happened within the last 10-15 yrs, but leaves off the development of theory at 1952, thereby giving the impression that quantum field theorists have been doing nothing but resting on ignorant laurels for 60+ years.
@@mrgadget1485 Judging from the titles and thumbnails of his other videos, I suspect See the Pattern is another advocate of the "Electric Universe". If so, this is a little rare for this crowd. They usually rant about cosmology and plasma astrophysics. They're always emphasizing electricity (as if actual astrophysicists never mention it😆), but they rarely focus on its quantum foundations. It's interesting but also worrying that some of them are now turning their attention towards QED.
@@mrgadget1485 I'd like to see those ancient myth-centric arguments, which EU advocates usually reserve for astronomy, but used in videos about QED. 😆 Like: "As you can see from these Egyptian hieroglyphics about Amon Ra creating the world, the ancients obviously knew about quantum vacuum polarization and the Schwinger effect. How else could you possibly account for these vague blobs? Tesla was right!!!"
Thanks, yes this was the comment I was looking for. I agree!
@@theamith788 Thank you. A comment made by truebaran later in the day made another very good point. This video presents the story as if the whole thing is a conspiracy. The story even has the trappings of a "secret government plot" by pausing on the Manhattan project, which had nothing to do with the development of QED. (If anything the Manhattan project delayed the advance of QED. Radar was far more influential to the relevant science.) But all of these problems are well know in the field if you do your research. And the resources are all as freely available as this very video.
This is sweeping a bit under the rug why renormalization is "wrong", or rather, why you shouldn't just discard all current theories based on a lack of knowledge. It is not that it is a lie, but rather that it needs more insight and restructuring just as any other previous model in science. The fact that renormalization results in agreements with experiments is simply a hint that more insight is needed. My PhD thesis was somewhat related to this and I feel it's important to understand that nothing we have currently is set in stone.
@pyropulse7932 Good luck with that. You're going up against a funding fueled ideology at this point; Not much harder to tear down than a 'cult'.
What percentage of PhD doesn't offer nothing new to Physics? 99,9 %? Congrats: you'll work for someone who hasn't any degree and, be sure of that, does not care at all.
@pyropulse The paradign shift begins with understanding that all forces are electromagnetic in nature. SAM explains this for the strong and weak forces, and Zhang et al demonstrates that gravity can be explained by what could be called Van der Waals forces at a distance.
Of a more speculative nature is the notion that the electron is the source of both positive and negative charges, presumably through different patterns of motion or vibration.
The concept is not so radical as it might initially appear when one considers the nature of magnetic poles, or of electrified parallel wires, both of which demonstrate attractive/repulsive behavior due solely to the movement of negatively charged electrons.
@@dbz5808 your weight would change in the presence of a electromagnetic field
@@matheuscerqueira7952 In effect it does. They've levitated frogs using powerful magnetic fields
"Others gave talks to show how to do the calculations, while Schwinger gave talks to show that only he could do it." I laughed out loud at that, well put Oppenheimer
For 5 hours, Schwinger talked!
Thanks for that most interesting history
Me Too!!! 😂👍
If you have started to walk in the wrong path.. you cannot hop to right path .. because you are are still walking on the wrong path thinking some day you will be able to reach the right path... If you have started at the right path and got diverted to the wrong path then you can go back to the right path and start again.. its like a tree.. if the roots and the stem is wrong how many branches the tree has it will still be wrong.. but if your root and stem are right ... and some of the branches are wrong then you can cut off the wrong branches and then new branches will grow again (According to biology--- propagation) ...which can or maybe able to define the right and correct path.. and correctly hold on to the idea or theory based on results.. When the pillars are weak the house will soon fall if you keep on building things on the top of it
@@ethankhadka1143 I couldn't disagree with you more. Perspective's a fickle thing. Peripeteia happens all the time. We all must help with open ears if we hope for the same from others.
I dont want to sound mean, I like that the author did a lot of research to do this video. However large parts are quite misinformed because it is looking on QED from 70 year old viewpoint and some points are mixing different unrelated things together. Most, if not all, these "issues" and discrepancies in theory are now well understood and resolved. QED is not incomplete or ill defined and Schwinger, Tomogana and Feynmans aproaches are all valid. And most importantly: Physics is not based on 50 year old quotes, many of which are out of date or out of context.
What needs to be understood is that f-diagrams are not magic. They are simply graphical representation of series expansion of evolution operator. This is mathematicaly riggorous. What is also well understood now is that these series will diverge due to mathematical properties of Taylor series, essentialy this expansion neglects quantum tunneling. We know for example QED will give you better and better results until terms of power of roughly 137, then terms start to diverge. Exact solution to QED equation of course does not suffer from this problem but is much harder/impossible to obtain.
It has also been said "coupling constant for fermions is greater than one, therefore Dyson series diverges". This is simply not true. Coupling constant of what? Which field? Coupling constant for QED is always 1/137 (+running of course). It is low energy QCD and other high energy QFT where couplings are strong. Then you cannot do Feynman diagrams and have to rely on different, usually numerical aproaches.
Later author introduces muon g-factor. The he claims on the screen that there are two contributions to g value, that is g from QED and g from nonQED. In that g nonQED he introduces g from electroweak interaction. Electroweak interaction is just generalizastion of QED, it contains both QED and weak interactions so this is either misspeak or misunderstanding. What is also misunderstanding is that he then compares muon g factor and electron g factor and claims they should be the same? No, they shouldnt. Actualy discrepancy of experiment and theory for muon g factor is the biggest window into physics beyond the standard model we currently have. So its not like anytime there is discrepancy we just "modify" theory results to make it fit. Quite opposite, we celebrate anytime experiment does not match theory because that is the possibility to discover something new. Today the g-2 precision is up to 10^-10 or so for almost 20 years. There is no discrepancy. Experiment (2006) can verify this up to fifth order, higher orders are too small to be measured.
Also, renormalization and regularization are perfectly fine. You expect infinities in theory which has interaction of 1/r, that is not surprising. I could go deeper here but that would be too long. Hope this helps.
Finally somebody commenting on this video who knows what they are talking about! I saw one commentator compare the perturbation series in QED to rearranging divergent series in calc 2, which is completely ridiculous. Most people who take issue with things like this don’t understand the concept of an asymptotic series.
Thanks for taking time to walk through that.
The "50 year old quotes" are all out of date and out of context unless they favour your viewpoint LOL.
I don't like the way you presented this issues-like if it were some sort of a conspiracy theory. You didn;t mention Wilson's work which gave conceptual reason for renormalization-you quoted Dirac, Feynmann and so on, which were brilliant but some time has passed since then and now we understand things better than in the fifties. Saying that renormalization is just ignoring the infinities is definitively not saying the whole story: there is a plenty of work about nonperturbative renormalization-for example the recent fields medal was awarded to Hugo Duminil Copin for showing (among other things) triviality of phi^4 model. There are lectures on IHES youtube channel about this. Renormalization techniques are used in the theory of the so called regularity structures which has plenty of application in stochastic partial differential equations (see the work of Martin Hairer and his collaborators). There is a very rich structure behind the renormalization techniques, the so called Hopf algebra of rooted trees and more general of Feynman diagrams-see the work of Connes and Kreimer. Even more, there is some universal group behind the renormalization which was conjectured by Cartier and found in the work of Connes and Marcolli (the so called Cosmic Galois Group). This clearly shows that we understand SOMETHING about renormalization. Do we understand all that can be understood? Of course not, QFT is very tricky buisness but nobody is pretending that there are no problems: it is a shame that you are presenting these issues like if everybody was hiding something. I read just a little bit about these things in Folland's excellent book ,,Quantum Field Theory: A Tourist Guide for Mathematicians'' and nobody is pretending that QFT is well defined mathematically. Everything is stated clearly: that first you need to get rid of infinities using renormalization but even after that the series which you obtain are believed to be divergent (for some of them this is actually proved). It is not the case that these issues are not recognized: in fact, one of the Millenium Prize Problems deals with constructing QFT rigorously.
What I liked in your video is that it serves as a nice summary of the complicated history and highlights how the brighest people are confused about there extremely complicated problems-sine the nature is far more complex that we could imagine
well said! 👏👏👏There's no conspiracy hiding this. It's all as easily available as this very video.
This whole thing feels like the professional equivalent of a high school lab class, where students fudged with values to get outcomes like those expected. very weird to see
Yes, mix it with some fancy prominent names and some fancy equipment, then people will gobble it up apparently.
Haha
@@DKFX1 Yep
My theory is after WW2 they intentionally made fake physics in order to confuse mainstream Americans, Europe, Russia and China. This way only the rich elite would have the real physics, similar to how only the silicon valley has Ai nowadays. But my guess is physics went astray long before that, when they gave up trying to explain the MM null result and Einstein invented spacetime, which is like a weird and nonsensical version of aether. Spacetime is like a non-substance yet somehow produces waves. Anyway, people keep talking about the standard model and quarks, but it just seems like something somebody just made up so they could keep their job. If someone can explain to me why quarks are definitely real I'll listen, but I want to see a photo of a quark before I believe it. My assumption is a real theory of physics will come from hobbyists, they are less incentivized to make up random theories. Because if an experiment at the LHC was useless, the LHC cannot just say the data is useless because they have to justify LHC expenses, they will always hype it up and claim that progress is being made.
@@earthenscience It's not too unrealistic. Physics became very militarized after WW2, partly due to the A-bomb. I can see how some nefarious mind might want to obfuscate real physics with endless approximate calculations, which seems like the basis of much modern theory like QED, QCD etc.
"Quantum mechanics is the idea of the absurd"? I can't think of a reason to listen beyond that first sentence. This channel is for people who don't want to know mathematics and are willing to sound stupid to people who do. PLEASE stop thinking that your ignorance is intelligence. It isn't.
For a theory allegedly built on a lie it’s funny how we have developed working quantum computers. Or we could just wipe the slate clean go back to the cozy shelter of Newtonian classical physics, and forget all this ever happened.
For real! And now have atomic microscopes base on quantum tunneling.
This is very interesting. In another field of study, this would be called "curve fitting". I've always admired Feynman, but after seeing this, I have the impression that Dyson is the most honest of all these guys.
Feynman's actions during the Joseph Papp incident were not honest at all.
"Draw your curves, then plot your, re-normalized?, data. --I need a good grade on this Unit Operations Report
I just see physicists doing their best with a very difficult calculation. Experiment and theory mutually reinforce each other, and the convergence to a finite value points to a weakness in the math (the lack of a good theory of renormalization), not in the physics. Feynman revolutionized the calculations, but didn't change QM or QED.
@@PhilFogle I only partly agree with you. There may well be a weakness in the mathematics, but you have not shown that.
There may well be a weakness in the physics (by which I mean the model), but you have denied this without any sort of proof or evidence other than current strong agreement between model and observation. This is only circumstantial evidence, no matter how strong the agreement.
This then becomes a question of belief, not fact. My belief is not in the model, nor in the mathematics. I believe that we do not yet know the truth. I am undecided as to whether we ever will.
I agree that the mathematics with its renormalisation oddities has been startlingly accurate, or so I've been told. But so was the geocentric model of the universe before the heliocentric model took over and fixed some of the inaccuracies.
Science seeks always to improve its models, I hope, or replace them with better models. To do less is a failure of science.
It is common knowledge that Dyson debunked qed. Only fools have perpetuated it's so called accuracy and success. Qed might have the most accurate prediction regarding the magnetic moment (there is evidence that the experiment was bogus as well) but it also gives the worst prediction ever, (e.g.,the vacuum catastrophe).
It is no wonder Dyson did not get the Nobel price: he was honest. Thank you Dr Consa for the great detective work on QED. Thank you for making this video. The theory is more or less a 'prince of darkness'.
The Nobel Prize can only be shared by 3 people max
sad they need to use virtual particles to complete their equations lol. tesla said it best.. “I consider this extremely important,” said Mr. Tesla. “Light cannot be anything else but a longitudinal disturbance in the ether, involving alternate compressions and rarefactions. In other words, light can be nothing else than a sound wave in the ether.”
@@toymaker3474 non-mechanical waves don't exist... everything needs a medium...
@@zetristan4525 Dyson was the principle author of QED, he turned it into a theory, not Feynman, and he proved eventually that the theory can only spit out infinite values after renormalization to finite mass and charge. Exit QED, which was the reason not to give a Nobel to Dyson.
@@koenraad4618 I love Dyson and his more honest path through physics, but isn't this a bit extreme?: QED is still a very accurate prediction scheme, even if not presented as a conceptually-sound theory. eg I don't believe in the existence of virtual particles, but I can still make great use of the Dyson series for experimental predictions, even tho I truncate the series at a (conceptually) ad hoc term.
I've asked mathematician friends if they can recast the asymptotic series as a convergent series, but they've found that too daunting a task.
I've brought up in conversation this topic and this specific paper online around a year ago and was getting a lot of heat and people attacking me, but very little substance in their arguments.
Glad to see you giving it more exposure.
It's because they view science as a monolith and if you attack their theory produced by their scientific heroes, you must be attacking science.
The probabilities of the wave function adopting real values cannot be generalized in a presumed continuum of real numbers, so infinity is considered the analytic domain of the probable measurements. Dividing by infinity means that you get "one" by integrating a real measurement, and "zero" by the integration of everything else, all the other probabilities. If you have measured a value in this way, you cannot spread it out in proportion to any other measured quantity. So you get a unit circle as the domain of a specific measurement. From there the Hamiltonian is just a nerdy way of doing linear algebra on the quadratic sesquilinear forms of abstract algebra, which are nothing more than abstractions of the geometrical construction of conic sections.
This is why Clifford algebras were disdained by the smartest gentlemen in the room, and Maxwell, Gibbs, and Heaviside and their whizkid devotees preferred to obfuscational complexities which make the problems seem so complicated. They are not complicated, so much as combinatorial, a fact which is literally hidden behind walls of numbers, the use of which as coefficients is entirely a matter of initiation into the arcane rites of academic pomposity.
Now we have followed the rebirth of mathematical physics from their Hellenic pyres, by decorating the Sphinx with so much glitter and obfuscational notational and conceptual nonsense that the bird cannot fly a single metre without a multimillion dollar computational facility. The Rococo Period has bloomed, heralding the ongoing decline of the Empire, the corruptions of scientific institutions being merely symptomatic of the inevitable march of history over the graves of armies.
We must learn to differentiate Science (which can only be made about PRESENT here and now) and Mythology which are subjetive interpretation. Scientific methos is about Experiments and Observation.
e.g. Double-Slit Experiment and interference patterns are Science. The Copenaghen or the Many Worlds Interpretation are Mythology!
Besides from the fact your video is almost reading his paper verbatim, did you not think to check his credentials? He's not listed on his affiliated university's website, his papers aren't published in any reputable journal, and his work is clearly amateur. Case in point, look at his paper Electron Toroidal Moment: where he uses images without captions or citations (some of which are just from Wikipedia), his equations and values are not properly formatted, and he uses non-relativistic formulae for dealing with the electron orbits.
Thank you. This video, and the paper it cites, continually quote old misunderstandings of renormalization which have long been corrected since the 1970s and 1980s. Red flags were raised for me after I didn't hear a single mention of "effective field theory" or "renormalization group". Not that those would answer the numerical discrepancies , but they are so minuscule. And he offers no investigation into the many factors that could explain those tiny discrepancies before he's willing to ditch QED just because all those coefficients look confusing.
Yeah.. Math is supposed to be the language of physics/science. But just like any language, you can use it to write fiction. Thanks for posting.
Good comment Rob.
QED is hardly fiction, it's not like it isn't useful to learn from at all. Lmao.
It is interesting that Julian Schwinger after a good deal of chicanery, ignoring Dyson's critique, was effectively dismissed from Harvard, as his genuine creativity came into question. Yet many purport to calculate the anomalous electron magnetic moment to great accuracy, while ignoring the atrocious instability of the Standard Maxwell-only electron. I don't care how accurate they claim the QED anomalous magnetic moment is, it doesn't prove that QED is on sound footing.
During grad school, my advisor ALWAYS pointed out all this mess.
The theory he was (is) developing for which I contributed a little bit was founded in differential geometry and looked quite promising. I hope it leads somewhere.
"which I contributed"
Yeah, you contributed to the "paradigm shift in physics", of course... congrats, you are the 27th in this comment section, lol
So much shifting... :D
@@TheChzoronzon Huh? wtf's wrong with you and your reading comprehension skills, my triggered friend. I said I contributed a little to the theory this guy is developing, no more no less.
@@magtovi And I congratulated you ... if you think that's a sign of "triggering" you must be projecting something, my mate :)
Now, the mere fact that you think the partial and tricky exposition of supposed flaws that have been resolved decades ago that is this vid has any merit, shows you aren't much up to date, neither your advisor
@@talon1313 gonna quote another post, if you don't mind...I'm as lazy as you
" First, it was shown by Glashow, Salam, and Weinberg that QED is an effective field theory, an approximation of the electroweak theory that's only valid in a limited range of energy scales.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, there's the more general work of Ken Wilson who discovered the physical rational behind renormalization. He showed that renormalization, rather than being a method of hand-waving infinities under the rug, was a completely justifiable mathematical technique which reflected how the phenomena of field theories are organized by scale.
Renormalization doesn't just work for QED, it works for higher energy theories like QCD and the electroweak theory, but it also works for the lower energy systems of condensed matter. (Try telling a condensed matter physicist to stop using renormalization, and I guarantee it won't end well)"
@@talon1313 no prob :)
We used to change the model to match the physics. Now we change the physics to match the model, and everything is screwed up on all levels.
Looks like Hilbert was right when he noted how sloppy physicists were with higher mathematics.
The most detailed and clear presentation of the evolution of theory and experiment of g-2 I have ever seen. Well done.
As a student I always felt I was crazy looking at all this mess and wondering why it was so convoluted, so epicyclical. But I chalked it up to only having a surface level understanding.
But as I’ve looked at it more and more since graduating college in 2000, the more it felt like Kuhn was right, and these guys, brilliant as they are, were maybe not wrong, but at least missing substantial portions of the big picture.
I don’t think we’ll get a major new shift in technology like what occurred with integrated circuits until this mess is better sorted out.
That's why QM was invented, to prevent the development of new technologies that would disrupt the business of the bankers and petroleum monopolies.
@Hectic Narcoleptic No. Do you have a poster of Einstein or Feynman in your bedroom?
@Hectic Narcoleptic Yes, he must wear a tinfoil hat, because anyone so irrational as to question any aspect of quantum mechanics must be a lunatic who also thinks aliens are using electromagnetic fields to manipulate their brain waves. Is that what you mean to imply with your tired cliche "tinfoil hat" remark?
Do you also think Dirac and Dyson must have worn tinfoil hats, for daring to question some of the very same conclusions reached by their scientific peers?
It's not a mess. It has a very specific and well-defined mathematical structure.
You could take some graduate-level courses in group theory and differential geometry, to get to a place where you could _even begin_ to understand it. But hey, better to be a big fish in a small pond, right? It's the Steven Seagal way to live.
@Hectic Narcoleptic Sorry, the comment you replied to was gone by the time I commented. Yours showed right after the main comment, so I mistakenly assumed you were replying to that, because I didn't read the "@Code Tech" part. My bad!
They want their math to work more than they want it bring understanding
Emilio Segrè, in his book From X rays to Quarks, states at the end of his chapter on QED: “once in a while one sees theories that become fashionable for a few years and then fade away, leaving some partial results of permanent value. In any case, this is not a new situation in physics.”
At 14:43 , it is not "in the case of fermions" that the coupling constant is greater than one. It's in the case of QCD at low energies.
This is why we don't use Feynman diagrams for QCD at low energies, we use it at high energies.
First there was the Universe, then came man, then came mathematics.
NO IDIOT MATHEMATIC WAS ALVAYS HERE WE INVENTED JUST Language to write it.. and this video is BS without any evidencer justz another idiot who dont understand thins..
then came the error
You've got that backwards: multiverse of metamathematics, observer selecting tangible reality out of that which by definition must support the evolution of said observer, our Universe.
Mathematics is just us recognizing patterns and learning to use them to the fullest benefit.
Maybe.
As a hypothetical, what happens if we do discover an alien artifact or transmission (possibly same thing), and after correcting for symbology and base numbering scheme resulting from differing number of appendages, it turns out that they arrived at pretty much the same mathematics millions of years before we had evolved?
Physicist should humble themselves a bit and read Charles Proteus Steinmetz - Electrical Discharges Waves and Impulses. It would clear up much for them.
When they showed me renormalization techniques I remember calling bs on them. The more I studied the more bs I saw. It is amazing to me how other physicist learn to fool themselves into thinking there is nothing wrong with renormalization and quantum mechanics as a whole.
Bit like astronomers ignoring electric and magnetic fields in the big bang theory
sure, micro d.
also, it looks like you missed learning about the renormalization group. i bet your mom thinks you're smart, tho
My QED teacher was religiously obsessed with the theory. He had the mental state of a Jehovah's witness stating that it is the most precise and most proven theory in the history of mankind.
Well, he accomplished something for sure. He made me disgusted of the self-pleasing nature of theoretical physics. You could say that I frowned on it because I was bad in it. That is also true for sure. On the other hand I am convinced that I was bad in it because it made so little sense to me.
I am able to grasp the working of any machine or natural phenomenon once I get the whole picture. On the other hand I see only dogma and mind-gymnastics when mathematical perversions are presented as the absolute representation of reality.
The derivation of quantum mecanics itself with shrodinger wave equation and heisenberg uncertainty analysis with relativity twin paradox gives me a sens of doubt that we should repeat everything starting fron newton and maxel equations
I found this fascinating! I will say, My dad was educated by Feynman - and spoke of Him often. I just want to correct the pronunciation of "Feynman..." It is pronounced "Fine man."
This is probably an accent thing
@@flanger001 | Could be, but if I did not know it was "Fine man" and I read the name, I would pronounce it "Fayn man" too.
accent on the fine.
@@joelwexler | Indeed!!!
Feynman is an angliziced name from German Feinmann /fainman:/, but the Yiddish pronounciation is /feinman:/. As Feynman was Jewish, one would guess that the Yiddish pronounciation would be correct, but in English-speaking America it is easy to simply pronounce his name Fineman /fainmæn/, which is also the literal English translation of the name.
As with many things in the physics community, the momentum of an existing idea seems to self-propagate like a bad virus.
That's "Peer Review" in action.
@@codetech5598 What not studying philosophy and sociology has done to the "hard sciences".
@@Ottmar555 funnily enough when i was listening to my audiobook of Feynmanns life he would always make fun of philosophers as they spoke their "mumbo jumbo" and "argued over a simple definition". He made some great contributions to physics but I think he clearly had an air of superiority over other disciplines.
@@shutupimlearning That is sadly the state of Physics, in general. An air of superiority for their heavy use of mathematics, but most of them are idealists (in the philosophical way) and have strayed from grounding their work in empiricism. I think the natural sciences need to incorporate the basics of philosophy and sociology/psychology into their framework to become more effective. There is a reason for the stereotype of the smug STEMlord looking down on everyone else while being ignorant about social issues.
Because of hypothesis leading to confirmation bias, need for income, and circle-jerking ppl who wanna think they are smart cuz they have a degree.
Many videos explain how QED works. It's refreshing to see one on how it doesn't work. And informative as to how science and progress get along. Thank you.
@3:22 "So expensive was their equipment that it made it almost impossible for the rest of the international scientific community to perform the experiments".
In other words: "Trust, and do NOT verify."
Half a century later, and that same principle still applies... because, LIGO and LHC, anyone?
To paraphrase comrade Stalin: "I consider it completely unimportant who in the [scientific community] will [operate one-of-a-kind experimental setups], or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this-who will [present the unverifiable results], and how."
I have a PhD in Quantum Physics (University of Manchester, 1998) and graduated alongside Prof Brian Cox. Looking back, it staggers me, that 25 years later, people are still "researching" the same little niche area I worked on in the mid-1990s. Most of this research has achieved nothing meaningful, yet people have dedicated their entire lives to it. I am so glad I left this behind and focused on something more practical and real.
press x to doubt
Every little decimal point counts...
Link to your thesis?
Time is a compactified dimension.
This forces renormalization as we exist on a single sided surface.
Surface(cos(u/2)cos(v/2),cos(u/2)sin(v/2),sin(u)/2),u,0,2pi,v,0,4pi
Passing over infinity places one in the inverted region of the single sided surface. Two regions separated by a node of maximal density.
Great vid. It is exciting times watching all madness of so many fields be revealed 👍
You missed Lise Meitner and Kristian Birkeland regarding Manhattan project, Birkeland who first (as far as we know) suggested the splitting of atoms in a letter sent to a business family, who later accepted Lise Meitner to continue her research at their facilities after she fled Germany during WW2. Meitner had direct ties to people involved in the Manhattan project, as well as the family's business who Birkeland took part in founding.
What we are doing here is asserting the current QED is a theoretical description of Lepton-Lepton or Lepton-Hadron interaction.
It could be if someone could construct a proper Quantum Field Theoretical (QFT) model. The closest we get is Feynman, which by the way is used for all sorts of particle interactions quite successfully so has some merit.
The aforementioned QED formula is what in physics we call an *"EMPIRICAL"* formula. As such it involves matching free parameters (the α's coefficients) in a polynomial to experimental measurements. There is nothing "rotten" or "suspicious" about this and Feynman is right and admits its not 100% correct. No one is claiming it is theoretically sound.
To illustrate consider Kepler's EMPIRICAL laws of planetary motion,;which ere very good at determining the orbits of the planets and moons etc. It took the theoretical genius of Issac Newton to construct a single Universal Law, based on Kepler's work, and with a sound mathematical framework, which was later improved on by Einstein.
The ultimate answer to all this is an extension to the Standard Model from QFT, who knows maybe String Theory or Supersymmetry will give us this. It is fundamentally wrong to rubbish a beautiful and successful model just because someone made an arithmetical error.
I finish by restating Michio Kaku's observation: "If you think my model is wrong, you come up with a better one"!
Only value of a theory is how precisely it can predict and be used for applications. For those who expect to find an exact theory describing reality, are up for a big disappointment.
True genius resides in youtube videos, attacking theory safely outside the confines of peer review
What's your point? This video is a well made, detailed history of science. If you disagree with parts of it, why not tell us what they are and give some references to support your case.
@@alanparker3130 I disagree with the part where he calls his “history of science,” “QED is rotten at the core” all because he doesn’t know how renormalization works or what an effective field theory is. It’s deceptive to draw in viewers at best
@@Cosmalano True..I seems so many people don't get just cos we find out more doesn't change the truth / validity of previously proven scientific theories..Itt just gives us a more encompassing picture 😁☮️
@@alanparker3130 it is misunderstanding some/many facts. I wrote more on it in separate post.
@@claudiaarjangi4914 Scientific theories are never proved. They are only disproved or shown to be consistent with observation. Proof in science does not exist.
as a biology (MCB [so like microbiology and biochemistry]) major I find it kinda funny how much faith y'all put into some of these hypotheses. in the field I'm studying assumptions are challenged and knowledge is updated constantly. perhaps the fuzzy and hard-to-define nature of a lot of biological data was a blessing in disguise- we tend to put a lot less faith in whatever our current hypotheses are than perhaps other STEM fields.
You don't remember the claim that foreign microbes, of the microbiome, outnumbered our own cells by an order of magnitude, based on one individual's faulty intuition? Or that siRNA would bind to the anti-codons of an mRNA virus to block replication, until it was realized that the siRNA destabilized the virus? Or the ridiculous 19th Century paradigm of race that held for at least a Century, until the 2020 Paper, "Recovering Signals of Ghost Archaic Introgression in African Populations"?
My first undergrad, Math/CS, so only applied Math like Partial Differential Eqs. Laplace Transform and Convolution Integral, Numerical Analysis, etc. Undergrads 3 and 4 in the Biological Disciplines and there is far more rigor in the Hard Sciences than the Soft Sciences. Yet the Math can only elucidate what MAY be happening. Then the Empiricists must design the terribly expensive hardware prove the Math even though Mathematically validated, actually correlates with Reality.
Don't worry: I'm pretty sure most physicists realize that we haven't even begun to grasp the basics of how things really work. All we see are approximations, the shadows on the wall of reality, so to speak.
However, we're at the point that we can mostly tell what we miss, which is a great achievement. But the more I learn about physics, the more I realise we don't know anything of the basics.
Even at the scale of Einstein things are hard to grasp. The consequences of a fixed speed of light are already quite strange.
Smart!
@@StCreed but, there is no fixed speed of light.
Seems like curve fitting to me. Dirac was right in his concerns. Also, what an outrageously brilliant imagination Dirac had to obtain the revelations about QM, Special relativity and spin and anti-matter.
This video is wrong for several reasons. One reason is that QED is a perturbation theory just like standard (non-relativistic) quantum mechanics; in fact in this theory the perturbation calculation is used, for example, to obtain the corrections for the fine structure of the hydrogen atom or for the Zeeman effect. So whoever says QED is wrong must say the same about quantum mechanics. Now tell me, do you have an alternative theory that explains the microscopic world just as well?
I remember learning about renormalization when taking QFT. I never understood it. Glad to know that I'm not alone.
Seems like this comment section brings together people who fail to understand physics.
Tip: learn the renormalization group in the context of statistical mechanics first, then go back to QFT.
Try renormaliszation of the 2D-Ising model, this is straight forward.
I think it's understood that all of QM is some approximation of a broader theory that describes the universe. That ultimate theory may or may not be mathematically tidy, we all assume it will be, but at the end of the day the job of science is to give us a model of reality that accords with reality, not a mathematically elegant model with reality and experiments being secondary. You have a mathematically elegant model and it doesn't accord with reality, you change the model. We got very lucky that we somehow cobbled together QED in such a way that it turned out to be the most accurate model in all of science (and it still is that). But the issue of renormalization is sufficiently front and center that it appears in even many popular accounts of QM. The math of renormalization is head scratching, but it works and it's not an entirely arbirtary process. [Also, minor point, but Richard Feynman pronounced his name "Fine-man" rather than "Fayn-man".]
It's odd that subsequent calculations always seem to agree with the latest experimental values.
Because the more Feynman diagrams you solve the more accurate the result. The problem with the infinities is they need to be curtailed at some point for obvious reasons ...but if you could somehow solve infinitely many Feynman diagrams you would get the true coefficients.
...but we can't.
The infinities shouldn't be there so we've got something wrong, but Feynman was hooked into _something_ with them... It's a shame no one else has glimpsed the same thing, perhaps we'd get a different intuition on it and different maths.
@@trudyandgeorge Your missing the point. When they calculated the 2nd coefficient, it was magically close to the experimental value at the time. Then new experiments were made and the experimental value changed, and then it so happens that now you need a 3rd coefficient.
If the math being done was honest then the theoretical value would not fit the experimental data until enough coefficients were calculated and the experiments were good enough.
Just like the crisis in cosmology. That's honest work. Fine tuning is just faking out results so you can keep getting grants.
Similar situation in the discovery of the neutrino. Reines and Cowan announced that they experimentally matched the theoretical neutrino cross section, only to later have the theory change on them. Then they retrofitted their experimental data and assumptions to match to the new theoretical cross section. And Pontecorvo (the inventor of the oscillating neutrino) was hilarious in his "dog ate my homework" physics in order to save his CL-37 proposal for neutrino detection.
Having an accurate representation does not mean the representation suddenly magically becomes the thing itself. A shadow accurately represents the outline of a thing, but we do not ever confuse a shadow with the thing itself. We are engaging with QED in THE basic philosophical error, pointed out by Plato in his cave analogy.
My problem with current physics theories is related to this but not exactly the same. We are taught that these “laws” are well-known…so much so that high school physics teachers think what they are teaching is gospel. Add this to the condescending attitudes put forth by physicists when they are talking to someone outside their field and you have the perpetuation of things that are demonstrably incorrect. Even at national labs, physicists put forth the idea that others simply don’t understand what they (the physicists) do understand…to their own detriment many times.
We’d be much better off simply explaining that our models are what they are…just equations that allow us to predict the certain aspects of the future given specific properties of the present. It can still be a search for understanding and ultimate knowledge…but without the pretense.
True. Only European scientists before the 20th century were studying nature to get to know the truth, now it is just fancy mathematical models that try to 'confirm' to experiments and give certain predictions but do not describe nature what so ever.
14:40 I believe you mean "in the case of mesons" instead of fermions. The latter is particles following the Pauli exclusion principle (they have half-integer spin). Leptons are subject to the electromagnetic force for which the coupling constant is the fine structure constant, approximately 1/137 i.e. smaller than 1. Mesons are also subject to the strong nuclear force, for which the coupling constant is around 0.117.
Great video, the historical context is very important and would be improved with sources and dates for the quotes in particular. For example, Schwinger did not participate in the Manhattan project. And although he worked with Oppenheimer, and Bethe helped him secure a scholarship at Columbia, Schwinger was appointed at Purdue in 1941 i.e. before the Manhattan Project started. In 1948 and 1949, Schwinger published three papers (Phys. Rev. 74.1439, 75.651, 76.790) expanding on his 1947 paper mentioned at 8:19.
I am imagining the conversation you guys had.... "if we always call him feign man instead of fine man" it will make it seem like.... I am imagining it because if you are dishonest in that way... there arent any ways that you are unwilling to be dishonest
Feynman *himself admitted he was talking out of his ass* about the anything that involved the fine-structure constant:
_There is a most profound and beautiful question associated with the observed coupling constant, e - the amplitude for a real electron to emit or absorb a real photon. It is a simple number that has been experimentally determined to be close to 0.08542455. (My physicist friends won't recognize this number, because they like to remember it as the inverse of its square: about 137.03597 with about an uncertainty of about 2 in the last decimal place. It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it.) Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to pi or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It's one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the "hand of God" wrote that number, and "we don't know how He pushed his pencil." We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don't know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out, without putting it in secretly!”_
How moles were killed during this extended whacking process? PETA wants to know!
Admitting that I cannot truly absorb much of the intricacy of this presentation. But I can and do believe that a premise exists in physics that is like fudging on a cake. Underneath the immaculate topping lies a rough and uneven surface. It is a cover that is required to make the cake look good. I think Stephen Crothers of the Electric Universe will enjoy this. I think it's all about maintaining the status quo.
This is worse than the endless redefinitions of the gravitational “constant” (among others).
Ana Maria Cetto and Luis de la Pena have shown that stochastic electrodynamics (SED) can be shown to emerge from zero point field theory and is consistent with QED.
So a proper derivation of magnetic moments should be done based on zero point field interactions.
Gee, wonder why physics has been stuck for fifty-years? Studied QED independently in grad-school and despite proclamations to the contrary, it had no discernible fundamental basis; no derivable principles. Ran away from it after a semester or so.
This presentation completely overlooks the work on positronium based on the Bethe-Salpeter equation which provides another test of QED
Fulton, Owen & Repko PRA,4 1971 as well the hyperfine
Muonium structure
Fulton, Owen & Repko
PRL26, 61 ,1971
I'm sooo happy you've made a video about this story and this paper. Back when it came out it made me lose my innocence regarding the state of modern physics and I finally understood why I couldn't ever stomach studying even a bit of QED. It turns out the funny smell was an indicator of its rot indeed.
BTW there's a "naught" missing at 19:00 ;)
go do math instead. i studied some basic physics and couldnt stomach it either. they manipulate derivatives as if infinitesmals exist, and do all sorts of other dodgy stuff that anyone with a math background will scream illegal. in math i haven't encountered anything dodgy during my time at uni, there's a lot of hand waving sure but if you spent time you can figure out the rigorous details.
@NRGY i dont know, i hear QED use a lot of functional analysis, and lie groups. im not versed in either, but they seem easy enough from the wikipedia pages.
@@estring123 yeah, the math of modern physics is awful and unsound. See the path integral formulation, which is a mathematical aberration
@NRGY Oh - did you guys just... oh I don't know.... fail??? OH YES!!! I get it now! wow... that's too bad...
@@estring123 "couldn't stomach it... LOL!!! Does anyone else see a theme here??? Anyone?
I must admit I was a bit doubtful when I clicked on this video, but it did not disappoint.
Same
Considering how natural the taurus field is in nature, it almost seems like the answers that led to infinity were more on the right track and we just lack the vision to see how so, or maybe to say, we're not giving enough thought into the process and its variables, and too much thought on an expected outcome.
Maybe infinities aren't a problem. I heard there are some number systems that work with infinite values.
@@evilkidm93b bigger and smaller infinities are infinites on itself
@@laryxislust6664 I mean, for example the number 3̅ is infinite: ...333.0
Makes sense to me, at least, but apparently it's not a rational number. I don't know what arithmetic rules apply for such numbers; how you can calculate stuff with them. Maybe by using some p-adic system. I'd love to hear a mathematician's opinion on that.
my undergrad degree in physics and my master's in astrophysics is a lie 😭
Curious what you’re doing with that masters in astrophysics
@@ultravioletiris6241 Astroseismology of zzceti white dwarves
@pyropulse I have a physics PhD from certain UC, and I'm a little dubious that they, whoever they are, meant that. And the video is crap. Despite all the runtime on the history of QED, it somehow leaves out most of it in favor of an ultra focus on renormalization, but even in that topic it leaves out any inconvenient information.
In any event, you're free to criticize QED all you like, but realize this is well treaded ground. And 40 years later it's still agreeing extremely well with experiments, well beyond just the g factor. You'll need to account for why that is.
13:51 - N. David Mermin coined the phrase "Shut up and calculate!" to summarize Copenhagen-type views, a saying often misattributed to Richard Feynman and his QED theory.
We actually did work out the deeper mathematical process underlying renormalization. Read up about renormalization groups, specifically in the work of Bogolyubov and Wilson. Certainly there are mysteries and problems with QED but this is no longer one of them.
Renormalization is squeezing a square into a circle. It's approximate but close. This is what Dirac's magnetic moment is to the anomalous magnetic moment. Squeezing a square into a circle. An approximation.
My absolute Favorite Channel on RUclips by far. Thank you so much for always posting these topics :) :) :)
I was afraid at first that this was going to be another crackpot video saying "I spotted a flaw in the math, therefore my crazy idea is correct!"
Instead I was treated to a very interesting video on the history of QED, documenting all the suspicious coincidences in the calculations.
Firstly, fantastic video; you've really done your research and explain the problems met by both theoretical and experimental physicists. Ultimately, I consider the reproducible experiment to be king and many physicists have shattered their minds in understanding the strangeness of nature. Bell's inequality and traversable wormholes are two I would cite. In talking about Schwinger and Dyson: Schwinger calculated a critical limit called the Schwinger limit at which point the equations of QED become non-linear. Maxwell solutions don't simply add together like two inserting beams of light. Rather non-linear QED causes particle production. One place in the universe where the electromagnetic field strength is above the Schwinger limit is around a neutron star which is key to me because in talking about fractal geometry and non-linear dynamics in the context of baryogenesis and QED. However, experiments producing field strengths exceeding the Schwinger limit are few; though I do have one in mind. Now certainly, it is no secret in the physic's community that the standard model of particle physics is not the final answer. Muon-G2 experiment being an example or measurement of the weak nuclear force in the mass of the Z and W Boson or how many quarks are in a proton, never mind the diameter of the proton. One thing I have growing confidence in is Alpha, the fine-structure constant, that is the fractal dimension of everything.... though how to test that against the Superverse in seeing its fine structure constant becomes the question. Got to love the Dyson expansion.... I'll need to dig up his paper on perturbation. Ah Chaos.
Please define 'Superverse'. It is unfamiliar to me.
The superverse? Lol I remember making this word up, the superverse, as a joke in trying to group ever larger structures trying to see how big we can make the list.
@@daxramdac7194 That's amazing! You must feel proud that Mr MacLean has adopted a word you invented. Merry Christmas!
Superverse is the application of the entire mandelbrot set, not only what's physics. We can also have paraverses, independent sentences playing in the same address space and time, and multiverses, sentences where infinite injuction from one state can influence another without causality.
Idk; I've heard of *hyperversal forms and geometry. Do I know what the hell that is?- no
The video is a bit inaccurate. While 'shut up and calculate' is often attributed to Feynman, it is a misattribution. (especially if you know how feyman is actually more interested in understanding than calculations). Also 13:46 Fermis criticism was directed at Dyson for a different proposal.
@1:30 not a good start. Pretty hilarious of you to claim QED precision is based on only one empirical value. Talk about gross rhetoric.What about all the other experimental values of lesser precision but which are far more accurate than any other theoretical framework? All the atomic spectra, the Lamb shift, the magnetic moments of other particles, scattering cross sections, it's a tonne of data. None of it says QTF is correct, but they are all measures of incredible empirical "success". (Caveat: I do not think QFT is fundamental, fwiw, but I don't go around claiming it is accurate only based on one type of measurement like you loony tune.)
@4:20 spin is not really a "property of the fermion". It is a symmetry, the spin number labels a representation of the symmetry group. The spinor is not "the particle" rather the spinor is an instruction for translating laboratory coordinates onto the rest frame of particles. So any rotational symmetry in the system (for anything, not just elementary particles) has to have an operator for rotations, in the geometric algebra these are rotors. They are classical geometry, nothing "quantum" about them. Thus however is Dirac Theory grossly misunderstood when dumb-dumb physicists blindly reading textbooks attribute the geometrical rotor transforms as a mysterious internal symmetry of the particle itself. David Hestenes and colleagues have a much better framework for understanding spinors. Spin-1/2 is present in classical physics already, as the way a (classical) rotor itself transforms under another rotation.
Distegarding infinities is a common mathematical technique. Look up „principal value“ or „removable singularity“. There is nothing mysterious about it. Renormalization is nothing else. It may have been mysterious when Feynmann atarted it, but nowadays we understand this problem. So no, QED is not based on a lie, this video is.
You always address the questions troubling me.
Good example of how measurements that don't suit people are disregarded. Now repeat the Bedford experiment. Much much simpler and anyone can do it and should be done to see how there's ZERO earth curvature in this supposed ball we live on.
I love that this is what qualifies as deep and dark and rotten to the core among the physics community... I would that our politics were this innocent.
The difference is that everyone knows the politicians are lying.
I suspect there's a deep, long-standing relationship between the two.
Its not that innocent though. Millions in funding money and even entire carrers can be at the stake.
Right?! These people were adjusting their theories to match the experinments. Maybe they were missing parts of the big picture, but damn I wish politics and most things worked like that. The world would be a better place if people adjusted their beliefs and methods based on experimentation and reality, not the other way around.
Yes! Technology based on this -arguably flawed - physics, works well; if only policies based on flawed politics worked a tenth as well!
The theory is accepted today as the best theory. It is an effective theory which is able to predict well and agree with the results of experiments. Of course further research can bring about a more general theory that also encompasses QED. If we do away with QED what is there to replace it?
Excellent presentation, the information is conveyed efficiently and in a straightforward way. I wish more videos on the subject were done this way, instead of being filled with the usual tenuous analogies and speculations and profound, ponderous questions that are dramatically posed and then go unanswered.
There is a very powerfull alternative of QED, that does not explain the anomalous electron magnetic moment but: spontaneous emission coeff, simulated emission/absorption coeff and more spectacularly the Lamb shift.
This is a back to basic electron shell model, with transition current governed by a charged conservation law (the electron moves from one state to another) leading to the single photon electromagnetic field. This theory has been well developed by Roger Boudet in 2 textbooks. It is incredibly solid and consistent.
The idea is SIMPLE: electron flows from state 2 to state 1, a transition current is created, then a non zero vector potential is created according to selection rules (spherical harmonics integral) and the single photon electromagnetic field expression is obtained. Computer the power radiated divided by ils energy and you have spontaneous coefficient of Einstein with a PERFECT dérivation. Truely amazing.
So, to sum up, how i understood it: take two arbitrary constants in physics, then calculate rough coefficient of correlation between them.. and then as you see they diverge due to increased precision of experiments, use a power series with arbitrary coefficients to fit the results together.. Yeah, that sounds legit (sarcasm)
You weren't doing too bad until you called the coefficients "arbitrary."
They are not at all arbitrary. They just required decades of work by brilliant researchers and computer algebra systems to solve the equations that reveal their values.
@@erikkeever3504 seriously? take any two values, compute correlation between them in power series. reevaluate if you get new experimental data of more precise new values.
Where you need brilliancy in such simple and blunt approach? Where are solid proof that these two values are actually correlated? This is where you need brilliancy. And without it, its just a poor-man's attempt to fit experimental data into things you 'feel' they should.
And of course, then you can sell it as 'quantum theory are most precise area of physics'.. yeah. sure. using 4th power series fitting.. of course it gonna be precise. no way it wouldn't :)
@@erikkeever3504 Is that physics? We data doctored(as we called it) in an engineering environment, trying to predict things in a known range. It was great fun, but I didn't think those in theoretical physics did it that way.
Renormalization is the best physics can do. The statement "rotten at the core" is nonsense. It is better to propose an alternative better theory.
What in God's name does it even mean for a particle to be going backwards in time?
Don't invoke God's name for what is purely a human irrationality. 🙂
Its a fancy term for what Steinmetz called a Dielectric.
It means you can do anything with mathematics.
These history-of-physics segments are so very useful. 99.9% of lay folk, and MOST scientists are ignorant of the very history of Science.
So the conclusion is that bad math gives great theories.
Another possibility: We are working with alien technology we don't understand. QM, QED, Relativity and the Standard Model are just very elaborate versions of the Cargo Cults of Borneo in WWII.
The main point argued on the video :The renormalization procedures on QED , so the whole QED as a QFT , is flawed because the calculations do not match with experimental values on the g-electronic factor calculations . The conclusion is wrong . The HIGHER ENERGY renormalization scheme in quantum field theory appears to be well understood from a mathematical point of view(thanks to people in Axiomatic and Constructive Quantum Field Theory which have shown us that quantum fields are not operator valued smooth functions but operator valued DISTRIBUTIONAL objects ) .However to implement the renormalization procedure in CALCULATIONAL SCHEMES may be very , very problematic ,leading to discrepancies in the results , IN MY OPINION . For instance , dimensional regularization, THE MOST IMPORTANT ONE , still remains not justified from a mathematical point of view ! . By the other side , analytical regularization scheme is mathematically well defined .But nobody uses it !.Note that all the calculations pointed out on the video were done in the dimensional regularization scheme . Another point to be raised and related to calculations in QED is that photons are massless .So one introduces a photon mass by hand on the radiative corrections calculations and vanishes it at the end of calculation . This could be sources of calculational problems , if not taken with utmost care as pointed out in the Bogolioubov- Shirkov treatise who do not use the dimensional regularization scheme (even at the light of the block nordisieck "theorem" which says it is no problematic ) . It could be interesting a mathematical regularization with a massive photon preserving gauge invariance .Finally , the most secure renormalization CALCULATIONAL scheme is that presented on the vol2 of Bjorken Drell text book implemented directly on the original QED set of Dhyson equations (a very complicated combinatorial recursive procedure ) .But surely ! .Renormalization on QFT and related matters is far to be completely well understood .
Woke up. Made a ☕. Kicked back & watched this video. Realized I'm going to need more ☕, & I may have to make it Irish
If the QED calculation paper is presented to the Physics department it gets a Nobel Prize.
If the same paper was presented to the mathematics department it would get zero marks, in red pen.
Actually the problem in physics is that it has been invaded by mathematicians and their mathematical tools being forced into metaphysics. Most of these people in these useless theoretical physics departments are completely clueless about real physics and a lot of those practitioners in these departments have a pure mathematics background. Some of them think physics is applied mathematics making it very clear they have no clue what physics really is.
@@michaelpieters1844 The fundamental problems in QED are all physical. Those in the theory department who are dealing with them understand that level of physics just fine, even though you do have a point that some theorists are not very good with foundational issues.
This was my "breakfast" this morning and what a feast it was! Wal has mentioned the renormalization problem in his inimitable style. You have put meat on this explanation! Bravo to you both! Thank you.
I don't think any high energy physicist regards QED as THE theory, because the whole point of renormalisation is that we do not know the physics below some small scale, that is why we integrated it out. That is, we acknowledge that our theory is incomplete and it does not work below some small scale (or above some energy scale), so we only consider degrees of freedom below that energy scale. I don't see what's wrong with this procedure, at least in principle. In practice, renormalisation is a very complicated process so mistakes are bound to be made. But that is a different criticism than saying that our entire paradigm is wrong.
You have an amazing command of physics and the obscure but fascinating history of these world geniuses. Many thanks.
If they were geniuses, then why did they spend all of their time pretending to have the right answers but never actually got the right answers?
@@manlyadvice1789something is always the right answer for something. People always judge another person’s something by their own something.🙋♂️
@@brendawilliams8062 Incorrect. There are right and wrong answers as to how the universe works. If some people spend a century being wrong, they're scrubs, not geniuses.
What they *never* tell in videos on qft for the general audience is this: perturbation expansion diverges 15:40
Great presentation. Thank you!
Spin/magnetic moment make no sense for a point like particle
I fail to consider that nature or reality itself is doing such complex convoluted long calculations continuously for each such particle
I wouldn't quite say this because even in classical mechanics calculations can get messy really fast. We are just custom to the thought experiments there the equations are smooth and the systems are not too complicated so we can easier understand the basics
Here we have to be careful, the desire for mathematically beautiful physics has led us down the dead-end street of string theory.
@@thegermanthunderdragonduel9873 Classical mechanics deals with larger bodies which naturally will carry more information
D.L. Hotson wrote an interesting essay about Dirac a while back, Dirac's Equation and the Sea of Negative Energy. After reading it I was compelled to agree with Dirac that it's very strange and improper to just sweep these inconvenient infinities out mathematical models with tricks.
This reminds of Ptolemy's geocentric system. It was very complex with its math and constantly made adjustments to agree with the visible motion of the planets. All because it was looking at the whole thong in the wrong angle.
Describing something with math doesn't mean that's the way it actually is. It seems to me they need a better theory, looking at it from the right angle.
I still find it facinating that the self-energy of the electron is divergent in both Classical and Quantum Electrodynamics. The correct answer to this problem could be as revolutionary as Planck's invention of his little "h".
Could you make a video about what the Hell these infinities are and what renormalization is all about?
Quantum calculations will give results that have forms like (bare electron charge)x(infinite correction)x(finite value). In renormalizing one effectively says "those first two terms equal the _measured_ electron charge, so I'll just remove infinity times something that can never be measured and replace it with what I know it to be, q_e, and move on."
Which takes us to, "shut up and calculate" and why renormalization is so philosophically unsatisfying.
@@erikkeever3504 Now I really need a video on this stuff, because it sounds like it's not even wrong.
Thanks for the reply! Cheers!
@@frenstcht It's not (obviously) incorrect, so much as an admission that there is an aspect of the theory that is clearly incomplete.
Consider the electric charge of an ion solvated in water... The measured value will be much lower because of screening by the surrounding water molecules' dipole moments. The bare (say) positive charge polarizes the negative O ends of the water to point towards it and they screen it away. Unless, that is, you look closely enough (= at short length scales = at high energies) to see the bare ion. By measuring both we know e.g. that water screens away electric fields by a factor of about 80.
In QFT it is the vacuum - the haze of virtual particles - itself that is polarized. The corrections to the hypothetical bare electron charge must be carried out up to infinite energy, because the hypothetical "bare" electron is a point particle (of zero length = infinite energy). The obvious measurement problem c.f. measuring the bare ion charge is that zero length is NOT experimentally accessible. What the infinite result says is that at high enough energies the vacuum is infinitely polarizable.
We know (or at least think) this is wrong, but with no available experimental guidance that would tell us what the correct infinite-energy theory _is_, renormalization is saying "we don't know what is going on at infinitely short length scales that creates what we at large scales call a point-like electron. But we can recognize what would, in the correct non-divergent theory, correspond to that, so let's replace that with the known value."
I hope this explains the renormalization "hack" a little better.
Normally these sort of problems, which are called ultraviolet divergences, go away when a particle is found to be a composite which provides a cutoff length/energy scale. No integration to infinity, no infinities. But the only known plausible cutoff for the electron is at such a high energy - the GUT scale, around 10^18 GeV - that it's forever inaccessible. And there is a huge amount of calculus machinery that enables integrations to/around infinity. To stupidly gigantic finite values... Not so much.
@@erikkeever3504 Wow...okay. thank you for taking the time to add that explanation. That does add a lot! Thank you so much for that reply!
And this is why ever bigger colliders are such a big deal, I'm guessing, because of the energies involved.
Thank you again!!!! Happy New Year!
How can any rational physicist justify "renormalisation"? It just sounds like lying and ignoring results you don't like.
Quantum theory turned into the new epicycles.
When our test equipment and mathematic are more advanced than our understandings behind observations, here comes, SR, GR and the quantum mechanics.
Those ideas helps us in “how” but “why”. Those are law but science.
Prior to Sir Isaac Newton, science is driven by behavior modeling and were reduced to numerical model. That is OK to advance our technology but science.
Thank you for the video, and especially for the linked paper, which summarizes all the relevant research.
I'm do glad I didn't choose particle physics, and went into applied semiconductor physics instead. There are no infinities in my research, and everything is mathematically consistent.
OH yes... "I didn't do it BUT I could have... cuz me be smart!!!!" LOL!!!!
@@newellgster what are you talking about?
@@yds6268 What? Did you miss something?
I'm working on it; I'm not paid, I'm not formally trained, I am not adequately equipped to perform these equations; yet, this is my natural element. I run the numbers somewhere in my head, I can see it working, I can view these results, though I lack words, labels, analogues; woe and lament as I might over my lack of formal training, I know these are scientific, I recognize Science anywhere, I can repeat these measurements; I simply must broadcast my finding, somehow, some way.
Oh my god. QED is founded on semi-empirical methods... I'm heartbroken, this actually has made me depressed.
For the college I go to in undergrad, quantum mechanics is a 2 semester sequence. In your first semester, you learn basically every quantum mechanics problem you can solve with exact precision. Every other quantum mechanics problem has to be solved using methods like perturbation theory to approximate solutions so that’s what the second semester was all about. If you limit yourself to only solving problems to exact precision, there really aren’t very many physics problems you can solve. The ability to get accurate approximations as well as methods of generating error bounds on those approximations are in some ways even more useful than methods which determine exact solutions because far more problems can be solved using the former than with the latter.
What a fantastic video. Dyson is really an underrated physicist. I think ultimately Dirac is right, but we have to admit that there was a lot of validation of the theory. The correctness of a theory is likely not merely the result of experimental validation but rather a combination of clarity, simplicity and mathematical self consistency which also agrees with experiment. The example which comes to mind is the geocentric theory, which also by the way does agree with observations and obeyed “some” kind of mathematical laws as well… Anyway very relevant questions here !