Vacuum Fluctuations and a Preferred Frame

[mfb]

I didn't ask if static fields were particles, virtual or not so I take it you mean by this that static fields according to QED are indeed an artifact of perturbation theory when dealing with the empty space between charges.

QED is a field theory. It tells you how fields (including the electromagnetic field) behave. There is nothing wrong with the application of field equations to fields.

 

[TrickyDicky]

Quoting a physics Nobel: we may ask, is there a fatal fault in the structure of field theory? Could it not be that the divergences – apparent symptoms of malignancy – are only spurious byproducts of an invalid expansion in powers of the coupling constant, and that renormalization, which can change no physical implication of the theory, simply rectifies this mathematical error?
This hope disappears on recognizing that the observational basis of quantum electrodynamics is self-contradictory . . . virtual quanta – the dynamical variables in the theory – are treated as free particles, uninfluenced by their coupling to the electromagnetic field, but there is no way to attribute this status to these particles as they can never be observed as such, exactly because their localization with arbitrary precision requires for its realization a coupling with the electromagnetic field, which can attain an arbitrary large magnitude. The divergences, thus, are not a mathematical artifact at all; instead, they deny the very observational basis of the theory!
A convergent theory cannot be formulated consistently within the framework of present spacetime concepts. To limit the magnitude of interactions while retaining the customary coordinate description is contradictory, since no mechanism is provided for precisely localized measurements.​