[joseluis]

I really think this paper should be more widely known, because it's eye opening: https://physicsdetective.com/something-is-rotten-in-the-stat...

It made me realize QED is the equivalent of a million lines spaghetti codebase that's been continually built upon, fudge after fudge since the 40s, while being sold as the best thing ever, the ultimate model of reality, etc. While it really started as a temporary solution like a bash script that should've been replaced by something more elegant... many decades ago. And now we are in this mess.

[spekcular]

The person who wrote that paper doesn't understand the basics of the field that he's talking about.

For example (from the blog post): "Consa gives an analogy wherein Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan has claimed that the sum of all positive integers is not infinite, but is instead -1/12. It’s wrong, it’s absurd, but renormalization has now been accepted, and is even sold as a virtue."

One when performs zeta function regularization, one gets -1/12. This isn't some mystery; it's a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Analytic continuation has been understood since the 1800s.

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeta_function_regularization

Edit: I read more of the linked paper. The claim that Karplus and Kroll committed "fraud" is basically libel, as can be seen by reading the complete account. The worst one can say is that people didn't publish full details of calculations due to page limitations or laziness, but this is hardly a special feature of QED. For instance, Onsager famously solved the 2-d Ising model exactly in 1944 but never provided details in print, just the final solution.

[semi-extrinsic]

Onsager was a bastard with omitting details. He has a 1949 paper on packing of hard rods (and other anisometric particles), which is 4 pages long, but a colleague who went through the details of the derivation spent half a year and filled a ring binder with intermediate calculations.

[spekcular]

Damn.

I never actually learned this stuff. Is there a good textbook account of this isotropic-to-nematic transition that includes full details? Or is there still a gaping hole in the published literature?

In other words, did your colleague do this as a kind of history project, or because the details weren't available anywhere else?

[semi-extrinsic]

I don't think there are textbooks on this stuff, it is too much of a niche, you probably need to read journal papers. A place to start might be the classic "What is liquid?" review paper by Barker and Henderson:

https://link.aps.org/pdf/10.1103/RevModPhys.48.587?casa_toke...

... and then the classic review paper on liquid crystals by Stephen and Straley:

https://link.aps.org/pdf/10.1103/RevModPhys.46.617?casa_toke...

But I believe the "gaping hole" as you call it has been mostly filled by the recent work. You probably still need to spend some weeks to follow along though.

The motivation for my colleague was to develop the Onsager theory further, since Onsager only went to the second virial coefficient. They were able to go to higher-body contributions and get nice algebraic results for the equation of state, IIRC. I can probably dig up the DOI if you want to read it.

[spekcular]

Yes, I'd love to read it, if you have time to find the DOI. Thanks!

[semi-extrinsic]

Here you go:

http://doi.org/10.1080/00268970801926958

[sva_]

I wonder if this is a consequence of people demanding more "rigor" nowadays?

[stjohnswarts]

Well with electronic form it is now quite trivial to include the derivation, so no real reason not to publish it or at least a detail set of steps so demanding more rigor seems fair.

[jfengel]

Every physicist knows about renormalization. It's not a secret.

An "independent researcher" might consider that a discovery, but you could learn a lot more just by picking up any textbook.

It's not "rotten". It's an open research question. One that every physicist already knew about.

[joshcryer]

That paper unfairly jabs at "Schwinger's numerology" because he chose the fine-structure constant in the equation (probably a guess, because he never published the theory behind it). It turns out the magnetic moment of the electron is one of the if not the most accurately measured thing in all of physics, and it fits perfectly with it. So the basis of the entire article, that the g-factor "was obtained using illegitimate mathematical traps" is just misleading.

You have to do the experiment to get the number, if the number doesn't fit with the experiment you have to figure out how to arrange the equation to fit with the experiment. I find this truly the basis for scientific progress. Even if we don't understand yet why it works the way it does. Why is the fine-structure constant everywhere in physics? It's not a hack it's experimentally derivable and has been reproduced over and over again.

I don't see anything inherently wrong with what those scientists "did" with their fudging and playing with numbers. Experimentalists are not infallible. That's why we need reproduction and for others to think up other experiments and to do them. That's what science is about. Nice history paper though.

[peteradio]

Newton didn't predict the exact constant of acceleration, he predicted the form of the equation and experiment fills in the rest. There is no conspiracy of "fitting the equations", that's the whole point of experimental physics.

[davrosthedalek]

Oh wow, that's quite a crackpot-y web page.