{"id":134961,"date":"2022-01-30T20:23:47","date_gmt":"2022-01-31T04:23:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/01\/how-mathematical-hocus-pocus-saved-particle-physics"},"modified":"2022-01-30T20:23:47","modified_gmt":"2022-01-31T04:23:47","slug":"how-mathematical-hocus-pocus-saved-particle-physics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/01\/how-mathematical-hocus-pocus-saved-particle-physics","title":{"rendered":"How Mathematical \u2018Hocus-Pocus\u2019 Saved Particle Physics"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/how-mathematical-hocus-pocus-saved-particle-physics2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt is what I would call a dippy process,\u201d <a href=\"https:\/\/ncatlab.org\/nlab\/show\/Schwinger-Tomonaga-Feynman-Dyson#Feynman85\">Richard Feynman later wrote<\/a>. \u201cHaving to resort to such hocus-pocus has prevented us from proving that the theory of quantum electrodynamics is mathematically self-consistent.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Justification came decades later from a seemingly unrelated branch of physics. Researchers studying magnetization discovered that renormalization wasn\u2019t about infinities at all. Instead, it spoke to the universe\u2019s separation into kingdoms of independent sizes, a perspective that guides many corners of physics today.<\/p>\n<p>Renormalization, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.damtp.cam.ac.uk\/user\/tong\/sft\/one.pdf\">writes<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.damtp.cam.ac.uk\/user\/tong\/\">David Tong<\/a>, a theorist at the University of Cambridge, is \u201carguably the single most important advance in theoretical physics in the past 50 years.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cIt is what I would call a dippy process,\u201d Richard Feynman later wrote. \u201cHaving to resort to such hocus-pocus has prevented us from proving that the theory of quantum electrodynamics is mathematically self-consistent.\u201d Justification came decades later from a seemingly unrelated branch of physics. Researchers studying magnetization discovered that renormalization wasn\u2019t about infinities at all. [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2229,48,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-134961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mathematics","category-particle-physics","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134961","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=134961"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134961\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=134961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=134961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=134961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}