[westoncb]

I remember hearing about this issue—or perhaps a related one in another formulation/area of quantum theory—where the 'infinities' had to be treated by something called renormalization[0].

Every time I hear about these problematic 'infinities,' I can't help but think of a novice programmer looking at the console output of their failing program, "it gave me all these weird symbols and says something about an 'exception'".

Maybe what's confusing to me is that 'getting infinities' in this way is somehow normal and not indicative of a bug, maybe? Otherwise, how can they be brought up in this way without the conclusion being, "seems like we got it wrong, time to try something else."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renormalization

[chunky1994]

The problem is that the gravitational infinities one gets in QFT are non-reonormalizable. Renormalizable theories must follow a very strict criteria (and even then they are rather difficult to grasp if you don't really put a lot of thought into it).

[westoncb]

I assumed that was the case, but it doesn't alter the impression I get about the situation. That still sounds to me like, "we can only apply this fix when instances of the problem follow certain strict criteria".

[c517402]

IIRC Feynman was also concerned about the infinities as well, but ultimately pragmatic. The infinities bother me as well. But, on reflection classical point particles produce forces that approach infinity as they become close, so the quantatization reflecting this seems reasonable. Please see my other comments.