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Comment by staunton | Hacker News Reader

This paper criticizes renormalization as illegitimate but completely fails to mention the interpretation of renormalization that was given by Wilson and others (see "renormalization group" for details).

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There’s also earlier strict mathematical study of renormalisation procedure by Bogolubov and Parasyuk. QFT Green functions are distributions and their product is ill-defined, thus their naive use results in apparent infinities.

This interpretation of renormalization supposes that there is a more fundamental theory at a higher energy scale from which the quantum field theories arise. These then have an effective field theory which is evolved to the energies that are used in current experiments. During this evolving the non-renormalizable interactions go down but not the renormalizable ones which suggests an explanation why we only seem to need the renormalizable ones. However, if one starts out with the idea that something more fundamental exists at higher energy scales one has already proven that QED is 'wrong' in the sense that it is not a fundamental theory.

> However, if one starts out with the idea that something more fundamental exists at higher energy scales one has already proven that QED is 'wrong' in the sense that it is not a fundamental theory.

Isn't that a given for all physics theories? Nobody thinks that physics is 100% complete and we will never have a new and broader theory one day.

all physical theories are effective theories. Nothing is fundamental

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