| This paper came up previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31217791 I stand by my comment from before: The person who wrote that paper doesn't understand the basics of the field that he's talking about. For example (quote from the other thread): "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 Also, 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. |
And he is completely missing one of the biggest drivers in modern physics: you have basically an army of researchers trying desperately to find something, anything that is provably wrong with QFT. Because we know it's not the final theory, something is missing, and finding concrete errors might very well show us the way to a better theory.
If, as the author claims, some original Feynmann diagram calculations are "kept secret" and actually wrong, all it takes is one postdoc somewhere to actually redo the calculations and show the error for all the world. That's a career defining paper right there, something that would make you famous in the community. If people thought there was even a 0.01% chance that was the case, they would be chasing it hard.