Something is wrong in the state of QED
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
The summary is that the author doesn't know what he's talking about.
Also, you say that his calling the Karpus and Kroll result a fraud is “libel,” but the paper references “Karplus and Kroll confessed that they had not independently reached the same result; instead, they had reached a consensus result.”
There’s even a Feynman quote saying, “It turns out that near the end of the calculation, the two groups compared notes and ironed out the differences between their calculations, so they were not really independent.”
You seem to be trying to discredit this paper. Why is that so? Trying to frame it as “libel”, in particular, is quite ridiculous in this setting and seems to betray some personal wish for the author to be punished for his audacity of criticizing physics research.
I dislike the paper because it is sensationalist and highly misleading. For example, as far as I can tell, Karplus and Kroll didn't "confess" to anything (no direct quote is provided in the paper); we just have a secondhand assertion by Feynman. Nothing they did is "fraud," as the author claims - this is false and defamatory. Further, the issue got wrapped up by Petermann in 1957; the author is just annoyed that he didn't publish full details of the calculations. The suggestion that there is somehow lingering uncertainty is just wrong.
I no particular wishes for the author, other than that he cease writing bad papers.
I see no valid argument in what you're saying, sorry. I also just want to point out that you used the word "just" three times in four phrases, to minimize and psychologize the author's arguments. For me, not being able to neutrally expose someone's point of view is a sign of emotional bias.
In another discussion on HN today Feynman's little book "QED" came up. It is still a great read and I think it conveys the theory's elegance very well. So I would suggest to read it instead of this article.
Unfortunately I do not know any good books explaining renormalization to the general public. Maybe someone else has an idea?
"Renormalization, in this example, mathematically replaces the initially postulated mass and charge of an electron with the experimentally observed mass and charge."
That sure sounds like adding an arbitrary constant into your theory and turning the knob until the theory matches the results. The comments here suggest that's not the case, but it's easy for me to see where the skepticism comes from.
True but still seems more like something one will find ViXra.
Sounds like the arxiv author may be greatly exaggerating or misunderstanding, but I'm not up to speed enough on the math to say for myself