The Nature of Quantum Field Theory

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There's other notions of naturalness that we use at a more informal level. And we can talk about like, why should we have some expectation that something is natural? The rough and ready thing that we have in mind when we say that things in the standard model are natural or not is if you have a dimensionless number. If you find such a number for no good reason, like it's the combination of a whole bunch of things that really should add up to something of order unity, but they don't, that's a naturalness problem. That's one of the major problems with quantum field theory.

Physics is in crisis, what else is new? That's what we hear in certain corners, anyway, usually pointed at "fundamental" physics of particles and fields. (Condensed matter and biophysics etc. are just fine.) In this solo podcast I ruminate on the unusual situation fundamental physics finds itself in, where we have a theoretical understanding that fits almost all the data, but which nobody believes to be the final answer. I talk about how we got here, and argue that it's not really a "crisis" in any real sense. But there are ways I think the academic community could handle the problem better, especially by making more space for respectable but minority approaches to deep puzzles.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/07/31/245-solo-the-crisis-in-physics/

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