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Has the idea of point particles been thoroughly refuted? |
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| Jul13-12, 09:40 AM | #1 |
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Has the idea of point particles been thoroughly refuted?
String theory may not be proven but has the idea of treating the building blocks of matter as point particle been thoroughly refuted? For example Kaku writes:
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| Jul13-12, 09:48 AM | #2 |
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http://www.physicsforums.com/showpos...&postcount=135 This is consistent with an electron having no structure and still undetectable size. Zz. |
| Jul13-12, 09:56 AM | #3 |
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http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Michio_Kaku http://bigthink.com/ideas/26680 |
| Jul13-12, 10:33 AM | #4 |
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Has the idea of point particles been thoroughly refuted?That said, you can view renormalization as saying that physics at the length scales we can probe experimentally is unaffected by whatever the actual physics is at much smaller length scales. That is, the "true structure" of an electron may be a point, or a string 10^-35 meters across, or a smiley face 10^-50 meters across, and we wouldn't be able to tell the difference: all these postulated structures are so small that they look like points to our experiments. Arguably, it would be more satisfying if the "true theory" consisted of objects of finite size, not points, so that calculations in the "true theory" could dispense with renormalization. But this seems like more an aesthetic principle than a refutation of theories of point particles. |
| Jul13-12, 11:04 AM | #5 |
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The fact is that theoretically speaking the "point particle" premise is not dispensable because the SM and QFT and QM, and also classical field theory and mechanics are based mathematically on it by their intrinsic linearity, either in the non-relativistic galilean variety in the case of classical mechanics and NRQM or in the Lorentz invariance of the relativistic one in the QFT-SM case and relativistic formulations of classical field theory. |
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