History of Science & Technology Q&A (April 20, 2022)
The Stephen Wolfram Podcast
00:00
The Trick of Renormalization
There are still infinities when you do the integrals and things to compute, for example, the self energy of an electron. If the electron is zero size, then those integrals diverge. And so what you can do is say, well, imagine I was in four dimensional space, well, no, actually, let me be in four minus epsilon dimensional space. That will give some results that have functions of epsilon. So they might have a term one over epsilon squared plus, you know, one overepsilon plus three plus something else. But if you've got several different things that you're looking at where they've all got a one
Transcript
Play full episode
