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by eln1 1494 days ago
Indeed, e.g. of Dirac:

    “I must say that I am very dissatisfied with the situation because this so-called ’good theory’ does involve neglecting infinities which appear in its equations, ignoring them in an arbitrary way. This is just not sensible mathematics. Sensible mathematics involves disregarding a quantity when it is small – not neglecting it just because it is infinitely great and you do not want it!. ”
and Feynman:

    "The shell game that we play is technically called ’renormalization’. But no matter how clever the word, it is still what I would call a dippy process! Having to resort to such hocus-pocus has prevented us from proving that the theory of quantum electrodynamics is mathematically self-consistent. It’s surprising that the theory still hasn’t been proved self-consistent one way or the other by now; I suspect that renormalization is not mathematically legitimate.”
1 comments

This is an outdated, pre-1970s view of renomralization. Thanks to work of Wilson (1982 Nobel prize) and others on the renormalization group, we have a much better understanding.

One good article that explains this shift (in the context of a debate in the philosophy of physics) is here: http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/8890/.

Thanks, I will read, but generally beside e.g. the gravity problem, with increased accuracy there appear inaccuracies all over the standard model, so maybe it is worth revisiting QED? Are you saying the g-factor inaccuracies are not a problem?

https://phys.org/news/2022-05-standard-particle-physics-brok...

The discrepancy in the article you linked is completely unrelated to how well we conceptually understand renormalization (which is broadly applicable to many quantum field theories, not just the standard model). It could be the case that the standard model is wrong, but my claim would still stand.