4min chapter

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas cover image

AMA | March 2023

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

CHAPTER

Renormalization Is Not Renormalizable, Is It Predictable?

Gravity is not renormalizable in that sense, so people had a rough feeling it couldn't possibly be a fundamental theory. Ken Wilson and friends showed you should think about renormalization as only keeping track of what happens down to a certain length scale or below a certain energy scale. It was a better philosophical perspective on renormalization than just being a trick to make an infinite number seem finite. In quantum field theory it's very doable. But I would take the actual original work by Feynman and Schwinger,. etc. As more a step along the path to this way of thinking about things.

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