On Fri, May 16, 2025 at 11:34 PM Alan Grayson <[email protected]> wrote:
* > Is it the electric field which is quantized?* *Electrical charge is quantized in the sense that, unless you have access to a particle accelerator, everything you see in your daily life is made up of electrons with a -1 charge, top quarks with +2/3 charge, and bottom quarks with -1/3 charge. But that alone can't prevent a singularity or a point charge that contains an infinite amount of energy.* *> Do point charges exist in quantum field theory? * *Currently the most accurate possible answer to that question is "sort of". >From a distance it looks like a point charge but the closer you look the fuzzier the picture gets because the point charge is always surrounded by a sea of virtual particles, and the closer you look the denser that sea becomes. * *If you find that explanation unsatisfactory and you are unable to form a mental picture of what's going on then welcome to the club. Even the man who invented renormalization, Richard Feynman, was not shy about saying something didn't smell right about it despite it being able to make experimental predictions with fantastic accuracy, in fact the most accurate predictions in all of science. * *John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis>* tnw > *In classical physics the amount of energy in a point electrical charge > such as an electron is infinite, quantum electrodynamics avoids infinity in > a process called "renormalization". The point charge interacts with a cloud > a virtual particles that pop in and out of existence with each having their > own Feynman diagram; the infinity from one part of the calculation is > canceled out by another infinity in another part of the calculation, so > you're left with a finite charge that agrees with experimental results > better than one part in a billion. It has been called the most accurate > prediction in the entire history of science.* > > *Richard Feynman had more to do with developing renormalization than > anyone and received the Nobel prize for it, but he was never satisfied with > it because, although it worked wonderfully well, this canceling out > inconsistencies business is not mathematically rigorous and so it cannot be > proven to contain no inconsistencies. Feynman said this:* > > *"The shell game that we play is technically called 'renormalization'. But > no matter how clever the word, it is still what I would call a dippy > process! It's a way of sweeping the problems under the rug."* > > *A few years later during his Nobel Prize acceptance speech he said: * > > *"It has not yet become obvious to me that there's no real problem. I > cannot define the real problem; therefore, I suspect there's no real > problem, but I'm not sure there's no real problem."* > > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv3PrsXVUQr0vzwHfv3jNRuxn-tuAVNw-%3D9wf-6uG512jw%40mail.gmail.com.
