By giving that dumb Greek Zeno a punch to the head. Really? Achilles can't overtake a tortoise? Good thing physics /= logic

mrshowrules: gameshowhost: Ok, so... they were finally able to measure something - experimentally - and assign a number. Dripping with awesome but I don't see WTF this has to do with the concept of infinity or how it's puzzling.

/just a quick scan of tfa

I think it is odd that you don't find it puzzling.

I find it strange that you think it's odd that he doesn't find it puzzling.

mrshowrules: I read the article and my head hurts now. Thanks geeks.

Funny. I read the same article and all that I saw was an advert for a book.

gameshowhost: Ok, so... they were finally able to measure something - experimentally - and assign a number. Dripping with awesome but I don't see WTF this has to do with the concept of infinity or how it's puzzling.

/just a quick scan of tfa

The problem was the closer you looked at an electron the more the theory said that fields from the electron itself and from particle/anti-particle pairs created in the vaccuum would interact to the point where eventually the calculations went to infinity. Clearly that is not the case since the electron, as far as we can tell, has neither infinite charge no mass, so finally clearing this up was a big breakthrough.

∞+x, x≥0?

"The substructure of the universe regresses infinitely towards smaller and smaller components. Behind atoms we find electrons, and behind electrons, quarks. Each layer unraveled reveals new secrets, but also new mysteries."

-Academician Prokhor Zakharov, "For I Have Tasted the Fruit"

PainInTheASP: That article certainly went out of its way to signify the completion of the proof, didn't it?

Meanwhile, simpler theories like Quantum NanoDynamics never get a mention.
/QND
//probably doesn't even exist IRL.

Burr: ...behind electrons, quarks...

Physics fail. Quarks are behind baryons, but not leptons.

DECMATH: Burr: ...behind electrons, quarks...

Physics fail. Quarks are behind baryons, but not leptons.

A; The quote is over 12 years old
B: meh

Renormalisation is crap. It has the reek of a constant that exists only to balance the mathematics in a model.

I suspect that the actual reality of how all matter and energy function just isn't comprehensible by our brains. Just like ants can't fathom a nuclear reactor, we can't begin to approach how the universe functions.

/doesn't mean we shouldn't keep trying though

madgonad: Renormalisation is crap. It has the reek of a constant that exists only to balance the mathematics in a model.

I suspect that the actual reality of how all matter and energy function just isn't comprehensible by our brains. Just like ants can't fathom a nuclear reactor, we can't begin to approach how the universe functions.

/doesn't mean we shouldn't keep trying though

Listen, all they did was normalized a few statistical quirks.

madgonad: Renormalisation is crap. It has the reek of a constant that exists only to balance the mathematics in a model.

That's the same kind of uneducated comment I see from the "dark matter is just a fudge" commenters in astrophysics threads.

People used to think of renormalization as some kind of mathematical trick to get the right answer. Even Feynman thought of it that way, and he was one of the inventors. But since the ideas of effective field theory permeated theoretical physics beginning in the late 1970s or so, people have realized that renormalization is actually deeply physical, and gives us important information about the limits of applicability of our theories.

Theories come with a cutoff parameter which tells us the scale beyond which the theory doesn't work anymore. This was originally regarded as a mathematical artifact, but from an effective field theory perspective, the cutoff tells us something physical about the theory. Sometimes the dependence on the cutoff parameter disappears from the physical predictions; this happens in renormalizable theories. What this is actually telling us is that the low energy behavior of the theory is independent of the details of the physics beyond the cutoff.

This renormalizability is good and bad. It's good in that we don't need to know the ultra-high energy physics in order to make good predictions of low-energy phenomena. But for the same reason, it means that experiments at low energy aren't that informative about high energy physics, since the details of the high-energy dynamics don't propagate down to affect the low energy effective theory.

For more about this modern perspective on renormalization, see the relevant sections of Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell by Anthony Zee, as well as the historical development in Renormalization: From Lorentz to Landau (and Beyond by Laurie Brown.