Dimensional regularization and Fractals - Is it a crackpot idea?

[petergreat]

I came across a curious site on this topic:
http://e-infinity-energy.blogspot.com/2011/01/t-hooft-veltman-dimensional.html
On one hand, the blog history is filled with non-mainstream ideas. (They invented a new subfield called E-infinity.) On the other hand, the people there seem to be tenured, and know way too much mathematics.
Do you have any opinion? Are they to be taken seriously?

 

[marcus]

I think the E-infinity posts are to be enjoyed for their high-flown satirical word-salad, but not taken seriously.

That is just my impression on looking at one post, the first:
http://e-infinity-energy.blogspot.com/2010_04_01_archive.html

Unless I'm mistaken the blog was inaugurated on April Fool's Day.

The blog seems to me to be making sly fun of some would-be serious mathematicians/physicists by working references to them into a melange of hilarious gibberish.

And it is so cleverly done that I am never quite sure that it is parody. I could be wrong. It could be serious after all! Decide for yourself

 

[element4]

The E-infinity stuff is not a parody, but notoriously crackpot! There exist a whole blog exposing the "founder" of this crack pottery Mohammad El-Naschie and his E-infinity theory (the site contains too much information, so start http://elnaschiewatch.blogspot.com/2010/05/concise-introduction-to-mohamed-el.html" for an introduction).

I have looked at many of these El-Naschie E-infinity papers, and they are all a mixture of word salad (containing lots of advanced math/physics words) and hilarious numerology. His supporters claim he is the greatest physicist since Newton and Einstein, and that E-infinity has solved all the problems in Quantum Gravity, nanotechnology, biology and so on.

So I wouldn't waste my time on these people if I were you. :)

 

[Physics Monkey]

That website and its contents are crackpot in nature.

However, the idea that dimensional regularization is associated with considering many body systems on fractals (instead of integer dimension lattices) is a sensible one.

A good first exposure can be found here: http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v50/i3/p145_1

The story is that if you consider special kinds of fractals that are nearly translation invariant (something dimensional regularization assumes), then the critical properties of the ising model, say, on that fractal seem to reproduce the critical properties calculated in non-integer dimension via dimensional regularization. For more general fractals, the critical properties are found to depend on more than just the dimension. It remains a quite interesting subject.