Something is wrong in the state of QED (2021) [pdf]
vixra.org
vixra.org
In section 4.3 the author incorrectly describes Fermi’s comments to Dyson as a criticism of Dyson’s work on QED. At the time of this meeting, Dyson had already given up on his QED program and was working on the strong interaction. Fermi’s comments that Dyson had neither a “clear physical picture” or a “precise and self-consistent mathematical formalism” were regarding some (pre-quark) pion theory Dyson had been working at at Cornell starting in 1951, not QED.
Dyson describes this meeting in https://www.webofstories.com/play/freeman.dyson/94 but the required context is in the prior segment https://www.webofstories.com/play/freeman.dyson/93
Also the author describes Oppenheimer’s initial resistance to Dyson’s work, but fails to mention that Oppenheimer was eventually convinced that Dyson’s work was valuable and gave Dyson a lifetime appointment at the IAS.
The internet is absolutely full of nonsense, and nobody is obligated to look through it in the name of open-mindedness. Most of us have things to do.
Mind you, I'm not saying the paper is bad. I'm saying it needs to pass certain filters before I spend time giving it a try.
Yes, the venue or the speaker matters, not just the message.
Calling that an appeal to authority, or failing to keep an open mind, is just something the quack cries to explain their lack of impact. That cry is just another thing it is entirely reasonable and defensible to utterly ignore.
As jjgreen points out (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34937266), it does.
But, whether or not your point of view is legitimate—in my case, I agree with your point of view, and won't give serious consideration to anything only available on vixra, and even just finding out an otherwise reputable-seeming paper was on vixra would give me pause—it is literally credentialism.
We should be clear though it's the narrowing process that has the value. Credentialism is just one possible means of narrowing that scores highly on ease of use, but perhaps not so highly for learning radically new things.
I think it's good enough to rely on the fact that the world has a lot of people in it, and there are more than enough people, not even including the idiots and misguided, but more than enough provably rational people who just have decided it's their hobby or even their vocation, to investigate even wacko claims, purely for academic reasons without necessarily caring about the claims themselves. They will bring anything worth our attention to us. Maybe we are all one of those people on occasion or on specific topics. To me that is quite sufficient way to allow for the possibility that someone did actually discover a way to burn water essentially like gasoline.
It's also a useful bit of information when making the decision what to spend time on. Obviously this is a decision that you have to make before reading the paper.
If you're a bit familiar with typical physics crackpottery there are many other red flags that might tell you this is not worth your time.
In other words, if 1 + 2 + 3 + ... had a finite value, then that value would be -1/12. But it doesn't have a finite value, because it diverges.
It's like saying that if pigs had wings, then they could fly. That's not something I'm happy to base physics on.
The mathematically sounds footing for this is unfortunately routinely not taught in undergrad physics.
I mean, do you really think the sum of the positive integers is -1/12? It's very easy to prove that it isn't. (The sum of any two positive integers is guaranteed to be greater than either one of them. Therefore, no sum of positive integers can be negative.)
It's self-contradictory in the definition that you're using for sum. It'd be like saying:
1 apple + 1 orange != 2 fruits because addition only works across the same units.
1. The sum of any two integers is guaranteed to be bounded.
2. Therefore, all sums of integers are bounded.
Many many examples in Math go against natural intuition but they are still useful
for example, you say that the real number isn't "self-contradictory". Look at the banach-tarski paradox, that certainly contradicts intuition. A large part of mathematics is foregoing natural intuitive, and just follow the logical deductions of axioms. That is how we got hyperbolic geometry, which is essential to special relativity.
It is true, that on real numbers addition is an RxR->R function, and you can only add 2 numbers, and you can't add 3 or even infinitely many numbers. But then you can define an another function that can take a whole series as an argument, and call it addition too.
You may forbid mathematicians naming another function 'addition', and talk about infinite sums, but then who cares. You can even die on this hill. Again, who cares.
seems like you're saying "we physicist got this from the math people, take it up with them"
but what irks me, is the attitude that disregards the proper understanding of things which you are making use of (in this sentence: 'you' is a informally defined: 'physicists from community')
Surely just a typo, but, just to make sure, it's Casimir (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hendrik_Casimir)—nothing to do with Kashmir (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashmir).
Isn't that a given for all physics theories? Nobody thinks that physics is 100% complete and we will never have a new and broader theory one day.
https://old.reddit.com/r/BrilliantLightPower/comments/ffnnxw...
Hydrinos took me down another rabbit hole.
[1] Nima Arkani-Hamed - The End of Spacetime (Sep 2022) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GL77oOnrPzY
The situation seems hardly different except which decimal place they talk about. That's how this kind of science currently progresses.
i remember from physics undergrad a million years ago that great value was put on predicting new things -- you can always find a way to fit existing numbers!
an epicycles vs ellipses kind of thing
(but of course w/o actually being expert in the topic, it's hard to really know what to think)
and it's not like you can say "let's see who does better in the real products marketplace" with many of these research things (over 20 years before viable commercialization, if ever).
Life is hard. Doesn't change the fact that a weird rant full of bitter ad hominems is almost certainly going to be ignored as being a crazy person wanting some sort of revenge.
But this is really quite normal for mathematics. Nobody argues that quantum mechanics is poorly-defined, even though the quantum mechanics that physics undergraduates learn is certainly poorly-defined, and most physicists will never learn about rigged Hilbert spaces or know enough functional analysis to define it properly. This never results in any actual disagreements. All trained physicists will come to the same predictions if they start from the same assumptions, even if they don't know the strict, mathematical formalities.
Definitional issues almost always arises because of infinities, and true infinities are rare in physics -- it's almost always just an approximation for "very big" or "very many". QFT has a lot of infinities. Quantum mechanics promotes classical theories with finite numbers of degrees of freedom into infinite-dimensional wave functions. QFT attempts to do the same, but with classical theories having uncountably infinite degrees of freedom. It's no surprise that there are definitional issues.
And even if you have an axiomatic mathematical model, you'd be surprised how little added value that is to physics as a whole. It's certainly an interesting and important area of research, but the fact that it's ongoing doesn't somehow invalidate the predictions made using formal methods, because those methods are reproducible. Renormalisation isn't magic, it's just a set of rules that you apply, and in fact, those rules have a quite natural physical interpretation (in terms of bare vs effective theories).
But, in general, I wonder why old papers (that are basically a foundation to other theories) are not critically re-reviewed to see if they still hold to scrutiny today? Hmm.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.10345
how can it be in any way 'scientific' to base results on unpublished material??
> The analytic results we accept as true are partially unpublished, and the people who did the original calculation are long dead.
this ain't science, it's (American) imperialism applied through the cultural-institution of academia.