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

https://vixra.org/pdf/2002.0011v2.pdf

by dilap • 3 years ago

35 54 3 years ago

jjgreen4• 3 years ago

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

wolfram74• 3 years ago

I don't defend physicists mathematical laxity, we are very lazy, but I feel like we can't get dinged for something that came out of Ramanujan, he's solidly in the math canon. Arguing that we're using it out of context, maybe, but I've never heard his work should be considered unsound.

munchler3• 3 years ago

It's unsound because it assumes that a divergent series has a finite value. It's a kind of fanciful fiction, no matter who came up with it.

In other words, if 1 + 2 + 3 + ... had a finite value, then that value would be -1/12. But it doesn't have a finite value, because it diverges.

It's like saying that if pigs had wings, then they could fly. That's not something I'm happy to base physics on.

donnowhy3• 3 years ago

you're essentially passing the ball to the mathematicians:

seems like you're saying "we physicist got this from the math people, take it up with them"

but what irks me, is the attitude that disregards the proper understanding of things which you are making use of (in this sentence: 'you' is a informally defined: 'physicists from community')

jjgreen4• 3 years ago

Sure, but I've always viewed Ramanujan's summation of divergent series to be a curio, I'd never have expected to see it turn up in physics. Pondering this a little, I think what disturbs me about this is the irreducible discontinuity it introduces. If you were to tell me that because of reasons, F = ma is wrong, it should have been F = m^{1.00000000001}a all along, then the resulting model of physics doesn't change that much; but if the Casimir equation should use ζ(-1+ε) rather than ζ(-1), then the sum is finite but as large as you like and the smaller that ε is, the larger this term is.

JadeNB2• 3 years ago

Cashmir

Surely just a typo, but, just to make sure, it's Casimir (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hendrik_Casimir)—nothing to do with Kashmir (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashmir).

jjgreen4• 3 years ago

Yes, of course (too late to edit that out now though), thanks

forgotpwd16• 3 years ago

Previous (short lived) discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31431033

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34873133

staunton3• 3 years ago

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

quantum_mcts• 3 years ago

There’s also earlier strict mathematical study of renormalisation procedure by Bogolubov and Parasyuk. QFT Green functions are distributions and their product is ill-defined, thus their naive use results in apparent infinities.

cjfd2• 3 years ago

This interpretation of renormalization supposes that there is a more fundamental theory at a higher energy scale from which the quantum field theories arise. These then have an effective field theory which is evolved to the energies that are used in current experiments. During this evolving the non-renormalizable interactions go down but not the renormalizable ones which suggests an explanation why we only seem to need the renormalizable ones. However, if one starts out with the idea that something more fundamental exists at higher energy scales one has already proven that QED is 'wrong' in the sense that it is not a fundamental theory.

bawolff4• 3 years ago

However, if one starts out with the idea that something more fundamental exists at higher energy scales one has already proven that QED is 'wrong' in the sense that it is not a fundamental theory.

Isn't that a given for all physics theories? Nobody thinks that physics is 100% complete and we will never have a new and broader theory one day.

gmadsen4• 3 years ago

all physical theories are effective theories. Nothing is fundamental

Laaas• 3 years ago

Discussion on weird subreddit about paper with author:

https://old.reddit.com/r/BrilliantLightPower/comments/ffnnxw...

Hydrinos took me down another rabbit hole.

A_D_E_P_T• 3 years ago

Scott Locklin recently (last week) wrote an effortpost about this: https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2023/02/19/anomalies-in-t...

bawolff4• 3 years ago

It is kind of hard to take someone seriously who is so obviously dripping with bitterness, ending their blog post with "Maybe some adventurous person outside the degenerate welfare-queen anglosphere will figure it out"

donnowhy3• 3 years ago

it's hard to stay positive when people used 'credential-based' reasoning to disregard your questioning/criticism; this is very standard in academia.

and it's not like you can say "let's see who does better in the real products marketplace" with many of these research things (over 20 years before viable commercialization, if ever).

ajkjk2• 3 years ago

This is pretty kooky and bitter, probably not worth giving it much thought. Also he seems, and admits, that he is even less knowledgeable on the field than the people whose contrarianism he apparently takes a t face value.

Certhas3• 3 years ago

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

jjgreen4• 3 years ago

Also on arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.02078

munchler3• 3 years ago

It's also worrisome to see a paper that's concerned with mathematical correctness using both commas and periods as decimal points interchangeably. See Tables 1 and 2, for example.

henrydark• 3 years ago

Many countries use them the opposite of what you're probably used to, and it's hard to keep this in check when writing in a foreign language (in the author's case English). This isn't worrisome at all.

Jcowell• 3 years ago

Is it maintained by the same people or did someone just decide to reverse the arxiv name as an act of spite ?

ajkjk2• 3 years ago

Definitely not the same people. I think it's by someone who was bitter that 'mainstream' science didn't respect their crackpottery, or something like that.

patrick451• 3 years ago

This is straight up appeal-to-authority credentialism. What is actually wrong with the paper?

SantalBlush2• 3 years ago

There can be quality papers on Vixra, sure. But I'm not about to sift through all of the bad ones to find them. That's not an appeal to authority fallacy, that's a useful heuristic.

Certhas3• 3 years ago

No it's not. It's a useful heuristic to adjust your priors before engaging with the work.

It's also a useful bit of information when making the decision what to spend time on. Obviously this is a decision that you have to make before reading the paper.

If you're a bit familiar with typical physics crackpottery there are many other red flags that might tell you this is not worth your time.

tptacek• 3 years ago

This was posted just last week:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34873133

gnramires• 3 years ago

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

gmadsen4• 3 years ago

Because it is hard and an active area of mathematical research. Which relates to the second question, yes, QED is the most accurate physical theory ever created and its unique predictions have been validated over the past 50 years. The issue is that physicists are a little hand wavy with mathematical formalism, so mathematicians are left trying to formalize , and that is worthwhile because of how effective it has been as a physical theory

movpasd• 3 years ago

Mathematicians absolutely have been trying to formalise QFT for decades, with excellent success in many areas! Have a quick look at the nLab page for quantum field theory: https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/quantum+field+theory . It is a complicated and hairy problem, and one that's frankly not even well-defined, because QFT can be approached from different perspectives. Often, this is done by using analogies with simpler quantum mechanical theories or classical field theories, but these end up not holding up to mathematical scrutiny when you try to implement them in a naive way.

But this is really quite normal for mathematics. Nobody argues that quantum mechanics is poorly-defined, even though the quantum mechanics that physics undergraduates learn is certainly poorly-defined, and most physicists will never learn about rigged Hilbert spaces or know enough functional analysis to define it properly. This never results in any actual disagreements. All trained physicists will come to the same predictions if they start from the same assumptions, even if they don't know the strict, mathematical formalities.

Definitional issues almost always arises because of infinities, and true infinities are rare in physics -- it's almost always just an approximation for "very big" or "very many". QFT has a lot of infinities. Quantum mechanics promotes classical theories with finite numbers of degrees of freedom into infinite-dimensional wave functions. QFT attempts to do the same, but with classical theories having uncountably infinite degrees of freedom. It's no surprise that there are definitional issues.

And even if you have an axiomatic mathematical model, you'd be surprised how little added value that is to physics as a whole. It's certainly an interesting and important area of research, but the fact that it's ongoing doesn't somehow invalidate the predictions made using formal methods, because those methods are reproducible. Renormalisation isn't magic, it's just a set of rules that you apply, and in fact, those rules have a quite natural physical interpretation (in terms of bare vs effective theories).

bawolff4• 3 years ago

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

zznzz• 3 years ago

A comment on some of the presentation of the history (‘staunton has already noted the strangeness of bellyaching in 2021 about renormalization without mentioning the renormalization group)

In section 4.3 the author incorrectly describes Fermi’s comments to Dyson as a criticism of Dyson’s work on QED. At the time of this meeting, Dyson had already given up on his QED program and was working on the strong interaction. Fermi’s comments that Dyson had neither a “clear physical picture” or a “precise and self-consistent mathematical formalism” were regarding some (pre-quark) pion theory Dyson had been working at at Cornell starting in 1951, not QED.

Dyson describes this meeting in https://www.webofstories.com/play/freeman.dyson/94 but the required context is in the prior segment https://www.webofstories.com/play/freeman.dyson/93

Also the author describes Oppenheimer’s initial resistance to Dyson’s work, but fails to mention that Oppenheimer was eventually convinced that Dyson’s work was valuable and gave Dyson a lifetime appointment at the IAS.

donnowhy3• 3 years ago

this is what I've found to be most troubling around this whole debacle:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.10345

how can it be in any way 'scientific' to base results on unpublished material??

The analytic results we accept as true are partially unpublished, and the people who did the original calculation are long dead.

this ain't science, it's (American) imperialism applied through the cultural-institution of academia.

robochat• 3 years ago

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

[1] Nima Arkani-Hamed - The End of Spacetime (Sep 2022) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GL77oOnrPzY

cjfd2• 3 years ago

Errors are not inevitable if these calculation are automized. And I would be very surprised if they are not.

staunton3• 3 years ago

Now they are. People (maybe 10 worldwide who care, I would guess) now discus disagreements of results (in some very low order decimal) due to software bugs in numeric integration code, most of which is not public...

The situation seems hardly different except which decimal place they talk about. That's how this kind of science currently progresses.

dilap• 3 years ago

the fact that the calculations always seemed to be chasing the experimental result seemed the most damning thing to me

i remember from physics undergrad a million years ago that great value was put on predicting new things -- you can always find a way to fit existing numbers!

an epicycles vs ellipses kind of thing

(but of course w/o actually being expert in the topic, it's hard to really know what to think)

dschuetz• 3 years ago

I have read only half of the paper and I feel like the author is holding a grudge or something.

But, in general, I wonder why old papers (that are basically a foundation to other theories) are not critically re-reviewed to see if they still hold to scrutiny today? Hmm.

staunton3• 3 years ago

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

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

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