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Exposing The Machinery of Infinite Renormalization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Nick Huggett  and
Robert Weingard
Nick Huggett
Affiliation:
Brown University
Robert Weingard
Affiliation:
Rutgers University
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Abstract

We explicate recent results that shed light on the obscure and troubling problem of renormalization in Quantum Field Theory (QFT). We review how divergent predictions arise in perturbative QFT, and how they are renormalized into finite quantities. Commentators have worried that there is no foundation for renormalization, and hence that QFTs are not logically coherent. We dispute this by describing the physics behind liquid diffusion, in which exactly analogous divergences are found and renormalized. But now we are looking at a problem that is physically and formally well-defined, proving that the problems of renormalization, by themselves, cannot refute QFT.

Type
Philosophical Issues in Quantum Theory
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 63 , Issue S3: Supplement. Proceedings of the 1996 Biennial Meetings of the Philosophy of Science Association. Part I: Contributed Papers Sep., 1996. , 1996 , pp. S159 - S167
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1996

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Footnotes

†

Limitations of space prevent the inclusion of two appendices in which certain results are worked out in more detail. Copies are available from the authors and at PSA96 in Cleveland.

‡

Department of Philosophy, Box 1918, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912.

§

Department of Philosophy, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08903.

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