Recent content by mendels

I respect your belief in the integrity of qft. But you must admit that there are varying opinions and that consensus of opinion is not a criterion for scientific truth. That Dirac called for an alternate for qft and Einstein sought a unified field theory, while rejecting the basis of the quantum...

There we go again! Referring to someone as a "crackpot" when there is no agreement or understanding of a technical argument.

Yes, you are right about Dirac's assertion, that the infinities in the renormalization procedure is the defect of QFT, that he saw as "ugly". All that I said previously was that the reference to the trouble with the Landau pole, is *a type of assertion* that he could not accept in a complete...

"whether it is really there" (the Landau pole) is the type of assertion that led Dirac to call QED an "ugly" theory, along with his belief that it is at the outset an inconsistent theory, leading him to seek an alternative!

It is certainly true that the possible existence of another field theory that does not rely on perturbative expansions does not justify calling QED inconsistent. But I do believe that Dirac concluded that (even after renormalization) QED is indeed inconsistent. Further, the existence of QED...

"On the mathematical level, there can be no theorem that would tell that no quantum field theory can exist whose formal perturbative expansion agrees with that of QED". But there can exist a field theory (e.g. a nonlinear field theory in general relativity) that does not rely on perturbative...

"QED is fully predictive and hence consistent". This is a logically false statement. A theory can be fully predictive in its domain, yet not mathematically consistent! For example, a theory may predict all of the known facts correctly, but in addition, other facts that are not true! It would...

Dirac's claim of inconsistency of QED came after the renormalization theories were published.

You ask "Did QED really succeed?" According to Paul Dirac, one of the primary architects of QED, it did not succeed. It is because it is not a mathematically consistent formalism, because of the infinities generated. He had the following to say about this subject: "It seems clear that the...

1. I did not claim to fully predict the data on weak interactions. What I said was that there is a strong hint in the formal expression of GR that the weak interaction is a dynamical manifestation of the electromagnetic interaction at sufficiently small impact parameters. 2. What I have...