vanhees71 said:
Is this somehow related to the Epstein-Glaser approach (as used in Scharff's book "finite quantum electrodynamics"?
I think only rather loosely, insofar as they use an extra test function to modify the dynamics. They still aspire to work with the Wightman axioms unchanged, so that there is only a linear dependence on the test functions that we use to describe the apparatus. Epstein-Glaser is generally not taken to successfully solve or evade "The Renormalization Problem" (if one accepts that there is such a thing).
vanhees71 said:
Another thing is that this hierarchy of resolution is a gift for physicists, given the historical development of science, i.e., they could deal with pretty classical physics first, before they discovered that underlying this "effective model of the world" there's need for a more abstract and less familiar "quantum model of the world", which however leads to the conclusion that the "classical description" is valid only as an "effective theory" for coarse-grained macroscopic observables.
The relationship between classical and quantum mechanics is the subject of my recent post,
"The collapse of a quantum state as a joint probability construction" (which links to an article in JPhysA 2022). I can't tell whether you've seen that? One premiss: CM has been straw-manned. By steel-manning CM so it has a noncommutative measurement algebra, we can ensure its measurement theory is the same as that of QM. CM
+, as I call that extended CM, has the same measurement theory as QM and is as empirically effective, but it nonetheless is different so we can learn something about QM from CM
+.
We can work with either CM
+ or QM models, as we like, according to this, but of course this is not (and cannot be) a naïve return to CM. By analogy with the idea of Schrödinger and Heisenberg pictures, we can introduce the idea of a "super-Heisenberg" picture that puts the unitary dynamics
and the "collapse" dynamics into the measurement algebra, with the quantum state unchanging. This also makes contact with the idea of Quantum Non-Demolition measurement and Quantum-Mechanics–free subsystems in an article by Mankei Tsang and Carlton Caves in PhysRevX 2012. Another perspective is that Generalized Probability Theory is classically
much more natural than has been recognized: a book by George Boole in 1854 (which I discovered only through a paper by Abramsky in 2020, which cites a paper by Pitowsky in BJPS 1994: why is this not widely known?!?) effectively lays out why it is necessary for classical theory to go beyond an uncomplicated probability theory (if probability theory can ever be called uncomplicated).
We can, in other words, think significantly more classically if we are sophisticated enough. Of course many people see this and run away from the crazy person, but not everyone.
vanhees71 said:
Field quantization, ironically, was rejected by the physics community as "overdoing it".
I can totally sympathize with this as an empiricist, because field theories introduce so many degrees of freedom that we could not possibly determine the initial state by experiment. My feeling, however, is that although we can't measure everything everywhere and everywhen, we can imagine measuring to finite but arbitrary accuracy within some limited region of the parameter space, and that seems to me enough to introduce field theories as an ideal limit of arbitrary accuracy. That's effectively what you say in this quote...
vanhees71 said:
In this sense the fact that Nature doesn't need to be explained by a "theory of everything" but in steps of "ever finer resolution" (or observing at "ever higher energies") is a gift for model building, and it's pretty sure that also all our currently used QFTs (including the Standard Model on the yet most "fundamental" level but also the effective theories needed to describe hadrons like (unitarized) chiral perturbation theory) are indeed "effective theories" as well.
I'm totally on board with the idea that our current theories are "effective theories". [Have you seen the YouTube channel
All Things EFT?] Indeed, I think the construction I offer in 2109.04412 allows the construction so many manifestly Poincaré invariant theories so easily that to me it makes the effectiveness of any given theory significantly more transparent.