Forget about Quantum Electrodynamics

[@labsanta]

🎯 Key Takeaways for quick navigation: Introduction to *the Muon Anomaly and its significance (**00:09**)* QED's reputation *as the most precise theory in physics (**00:22**)* Invitation to *delve into the history of QED's development (**00:36**)* Postwar physics *conference with no participation from earlier generation (**01:02**)* Willis Lamb's *discovery of the Lamb shift in hydrogen (**01:30**)* Hans Bethe's *approximate calculation using QED (**01:59**)* Introduction of *the g-factor and its precise measurement (**02:28**)* Richard Feynman's *diagrams and their tantalizing resemblance to experiment (**02:58**)* Challenges with *Feynman's theory and its lack of mathematical rigor (**03:29**)* Julian Schwinger's *469-formula theory and its questionable accuracy (**04:25**)* Sin-Itiro Tomonaga's *seemingly incompatible third theory (**04:53**)* Freeman Dyson's *1950 paper unifying the theories and its impact (**04:53**)* Purcell and *Gardner's experimental g-factor value and its agreement with theory (**05:55**)* Karplus and *Kroll's correction calculations using Feynman diagrams (**05:55**)* The discovery *of errors in both the experimental value and theoretical calculations (**06:25**)* Peterman and *Sommerfeld's new calculations and their starkly different results (**06:53**)* The unprecedented *lack of scrutiny and unpublished nature of key calculations (**07:25**)* Oliver Consa's *discovery of deliberate falsification by Karplus and Kroll (**07:56**)* - The series used in QED calculations doesn't converge, making it unreliable and potentially yielding nonsensical results. - This undermines the theoretical basis of QED, known as perturbation theory, which is crucial for predicting particle behavior. - Dyson's discovery received little attention, with no significant impact on physicists' acceptance of QED. - This suggests a reluctance to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy within the physics community. - Dyson eventually expressed regret for his role in promoting QED, acknowledging its inherent inconsistencies. - This highlights the lack of transparency and critical examination within the field. - QED was originally conceived as a temporary solution, expected to be replaced by a more robust theory. - Its continued persistence, despite known flaws, raises questions about the scientific rigor of its validation.

[@John_Smith__]

I truly did not knew about this until I have seen your video! Dear Mr. Unzicker Thank you for your Work and Integrity by telling everyone the Scientific Truth as it is! Finally someone with Integrity talking about science and physics in particular!

[@peterschaeffer]

The presentation mentions Freeman Dyson in passing. I once met Freeman Dyson and his wife. I was (many years ago) helping a couple use AOL (that tells you how long ago it was). After a while, I realized who the couple was. I was astounded.

[@TheMachian]

Thanks for this personal impression. Feel free to contact me via ChannelInfo.

[@u.v.s.5583]

Ah, yes, the old chap Freeman! When he ran out of gasoline, he used to throw nukes behind his car to accelerate!

[@mlmimichaellucasmontereyin6765]

@@u.v.s.5583 LOL!!! Yet, nobody's all bad. ;-)

[@dougr.2398]

I heard Dyson speak at the Gibbs Symposium at Yale. Terrific speaker and history, but alas, a climate change denier subsequently. My name is in the list of attendees, and I was the sole representative employed by an unallied (with physics) government department

[@jackpatplod174]

@@dougr.2398 Brilliant physicist AND a skeptic of Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick nonsense. Dyson has just risen to the tip-top of my top-ten. He can obviously sniff out the same questionable mathematical sleight of hand used by climate scientists as with QED. (He has knocked off Sir Fred Hoyle from the number one spot… another maverick who thanks to JWST will soon be proven right too)

[@js7244]

thanks for been so open about it. I'm currently finishing my master's thesis in an extension of the Standard Model, and to be honest, after really trying to find some sense to the to QED I couldn't.. The information that you present closes a cicle for me. Now i'm looking for new horizons where to continue my passion for physics, it seem like going back to the lab is going to be way...

[@sillymesilly]

Lab is always the way. Lab birthes and murders theories.

[@Verschlungen]

If anyone is curious, the quote from Feynman about renormalization (at 13:18-13:40) is found in his book QED (1990[1985]) p. 128. I had certainly "noted it" myself when reading QED, but failed to grasp its full significance. Many thanks to Unzicker for putting it in the spotlight and giving a complete explanation of its context and implications!

[@reaperinsaltbrine5211]

QED reminds me to the case of Claude Shannon, to whom - when he ran to some thoretical problems about his information theory - Neumann said something along the lines of "just call it Entropy, nobody knows what it is, anyway".

[@NondescriptMammal]

I like that Feynman had the scientific integrity to say, "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum dynamics", despite that he shared a Nobel prize for his work in that field.

[@cunjoz]

my 1st thought was that QED stood for quod erat demonstrandum

[@jacobpeters5458]

@@cunjoz Quit Eating Doritos

[@Gunni1972]

@@NondescriptMammal Well, did he give back that Nobel Prize? Just asking because i try to find out how far " Integrity" can be calculated.

[@lazmotron]

All the videos I click on your channel just keep getting better and better

[@hillstrong715]

Unpublished computer code is the bane of any research area. From my own experience over 40 years doing actual analysis and correction and maintenance of computer applications, it has been common during that time for the actual code to be shown as rubbish. I am particularly sceptical of all systems for which we have no access to the code.

[@MGMG-kf3wq]

I am much older and wiser now, than when I was at university and soon after, and my B.S. meter is much more finely tuned. As well is my understanding of human nature, and the need of many, otherwise fine people of the mind, to pursue fame and fortune at the expense of integrity. I find it strange and so out of the ordinary to me . . . but such is life. I am saddened, but at the same time glad that you made this video.

[@antoinebrgt]

I don't know is this video is some kind of hoax or if it meant to be taken seriously... In the latter case, I would like to make a few comments for those who might watch it and think that indeed QED is flawed in some way. First, the fact that the series is divergent is well known, and it's not a problem, the concept of asymptotic series explains why it's still useful and provides the right answer. Second, renormalization is now well understood, and the quotes from 50 years ago mean nothing in this respect (they simply reflect the status of the field as viewed by their author at the time). Finally, for possible errors in the computation of magnetic moments, I have not checked myself and there might have been errors in the past, but this computation has been checked several times by independent teams by now, so I consider it very unlikely that there remain such mistakes as the omission of a diagram. Globally a very deceptive video...

[@TheMachian]

People who claim that something is "now well understood" usually do not understand it. Good luck with further parroting then.

[@ndiaz9676]

I was searching for a comment like this..As a physicist my self I can only support your comment and strongly suggest nobody takes this extremely deceptive video seriously

[@antoinebrgt]

@@TheMachian I don't think I'm parroting, I just say renormalization is well understood because I understand it, in the case of QED it's at the level of a graduate course (for non abelian gauge theories it's technically harder).

[@stratm]

I am truly inclined to agree with you, but I always come back to the fact that it is non falsifiable. There is something missing, and we are deceiving ourselves If we think our current understanding is even close to what is actually going on.

[@cunjoz]

@@stratm thank you for approaching science with epistemology. this is sorely lacking.

[@reframer8250]

Maybe I can contribute a little appraisement of the addressed topic. I do not want to claim, that I am able to finally assess the statements about QED. But I have specialized in quantum field theory within my master studies. I liked the concept very much, because it is very impressive and you really learn to calculate, when you deal with it! But there is one thing, that disturbed me about it from the beginning until today: It is not possible to fundamentally calculate the dynamics of a physical process using this theory. And by "not possible" I mean, that I did not find any person so far, that came up with a calculation about it. Nor have I been able to come up with such a calculation. In the beginning I thought this was the consequence of my incomprehension. But after years of studying and talking to other people, that are deeply within this topic and not finding any satisfying answer to simple questions like "how do electrons move, when repelling each other" I started to consider the idea, that the theory might not be fundamentally consistent/definable. The problem is, that people do not care about this. They only want to know how particles move out of the experiment after having hit each other. And they think that so called correlation functions, that can be calculated out of the theory, tell them something about the probability distribution of that process. Well, it might be that this works quiet well for certain processes. But in my opinion this does not provide us an explenation of fundamental processes. Because it is simply "not possible" to simulate or calculate such processes. You can only calculate probability distributions for the outcome of measurments (what ever that fundamentally means, no one can define this, really, no one can!). In contrast it is possible (on a very abstract level) to calculate constants like the gyromagnetic ratio. So it would be really remarkable, if even such calculations are on a dubious mathematical level. Therefore I consider the addressed topic of Dr. Unzicker to be very important. I think it is worth to investigate the mentioned papers further.

[@TheMachian]

Thank you for this interesting perspective. It is truely remarkable that, though being involved in the "community", you have been able to maintain these important critical thoughts. My sincere compliments.

[@Burevestnik9M730]

The best picture of electrons in my simple mind is that they are pinpricks in ether through which energy flows in and out.

[@reframer8250]

@@TheMachian Thanks a lot! I think many people within the "community" have similar thoughts. But they often see them as own incomprehension and not as a problem of the concept. And sometimes it is actually difficult to distinguish between "I do not understand something" and "it is not understandable". But within the commuinty there is a current fashion to think that it is completely ok to not understand various things in detail. And therefore everything "dubious" can be hidden behind that "oh I do not understand, because it's very complicated" and "just go on and calculate some result". And that I see very problematic.

[@TheMachian]

You made a very good point.

[@stephenanastasi748]

@@Burevestnik9M730 What do you mean when you refer to energy? What does it mean to say energy is flowing?

[@illogicmath]

It would be extraordinary if Unzicker could team up with Sabine Hossenfelder and make a series of videos where they review all those suspicious achievements in physics like the ones mentioned in Wolfgang Kundt"s book

[@MiguelGarcia-zx1qj]

I was thinking along similar lines. But Sabine Hossenfelder votes for the intrinsic ugliness of the Real World (or, at least, to not request that it be beauty), and Unzicker favors the opposite point of view ...

[@TheMachian]

@@MiguelGarcia-zx1qj Not exactly the opposite. My claim is that good physics is simple - which is backed by historical evidence. Sabine Hossenfelder does a great job, yet I wish she would look more deeply into history.

[@mlmimichaellucasmontereyin6765]

AB - Unfortunately, neither can be bothered to even respond to my contributions to simplifying QM & physics with logically & holistically realistic alternatives to self-obsoleting theory & the deficient paradigm that supports what Alex (& Einsterin) eventually diagnosed as insanity.

[@santerisatama5409]

@@MiguelGarcia-zx1qj The problem is that the math theory (axiomatic set theory and so called "real numbers") that Sabine etc. work with is butt ugly and deeply dishonest...

[@davidwilkie9551]

@@TheMachian no matter how you look at the past-future presence of holographic history, the transparency and reflection properties are confusing. We rely on looking both ways at once, as Physicists look at Mathematics and the Modulation Mechanism Singularity inside-outside presence here-now-forever positioning for QM-TIME Completeness.

[@starexplorers1202]

I have to admit that I never got the full memo on this problem. While I new there was a problem I was always led to believe (books I've read) that renormalization "fixed" the problem. In the words of Nomad from Star Trek (Original Series) "I must...reevaluate."

[@TheBarowner]

This is one of your best videos!

[@jonbainmusicvideos8045]

lol

[@t.o.e.vry1247]

Liked, subscribed, commented, and thank you. I luckily stumbled upon this video second in my search and so saving me! I look forward to hearing what fundamental physics are.

[@n-da-bunka2650]

Well done. This is the second one of these I have seen in the last 2 days

[@EddieVBlueIsland]

As Francis Bacon said "We learn more readly from error than from confusion" QED is a scafold that has done it's job - explain light at small level of detail -Glad the great Physicist of the past left many more things to be discovered.

[@billoddy5637]

But if they leave too much, they weren’t very useful were they?!

[@DavidLoveMore]

The same problems plague all branches of science.

[@googleyoutubechannel8554]

The problem is that the field of physics has written themselves into a corner over the past 70 years and they know it, and have created almost 'religious texts'. There is no way to get funding for the 'many thing to be discovered'. You have to throw away so much of the baby to get on solid footing, questioning QM, QED. It would be an insurmountable social, economic, and intellectual task for any newly minted PhD. We may not get out of this intellectual hole for hundreds or thousands of years, even AI can't save us if it doesn't have the right framework and data to evaluate.

[@ivoryas1696]

​@@billoddy5637 It would depend on what you were defining as "too much"? In this case, most people's answer to your question is probably yes, but idk.

[@RupecPupec]

Did Mr. Unzicker hear about Kenneth Wilson? Maybe he could make a video about him and the renormalization group?

[@sklingberg]

In Feynman's book QED, a transcript from his lectures, he starts by saying the lecture is about a part of physics that we now about, "that has been very thoroughly analyzed". But in the last chapter he discuss loose ends, giving a feeling that there is much we don't know. The book ends with proofreader's ("fact checkers") comments, smoothing over the problems. My concern is, can we rely on QED? What part can we trust, and where should we be suspicious?

[@TheMachian]

After carefully examining Consa's papers, the conclusion is: there is nothing in QED we can rely on - something I had suspected, but Consa backed this with a brillant investigation.

[@KigenEkeson]

@@TheMachian I haven't read Consa's papers, but surely notions set forth in QED such as the 'sum of all probabilities' contributing to final probabilities as well as the explanations/calculations concerning the degree of reflection of light on translucent surfaces has some validity. Do you disagree?

[@mlmimichaellucasmontereyin6765]

Alex's insight into Feynman's brilliance & deficiencies & the defects of QED, QM 'physics'/maths, etc., is spot on. There is much that materialistic QMs ('quantum mechanics') don't know because they limit themselves to thinking & talking about a tiny fraction of 5% of the realities of the 'field' of being (the cosmos). Why? Review Alex's final assessment of the psychosocial problem.

[@sinfinite7516]

@@KigenEkeson bruh just read Consa’s papers 🗿

[@fredmoss3515]

This world is beyond me is so many ways ..... but I get the feeling the same thing has happened with Pharmacology ...... Thank you for standing up & questioning ...... so important.

[@SteampunkGent]

I'm a complete layman with only the most superficial understanding of QED so came across this by accident. It is clear and concise but even more than this is outstandingly brave of Dr Unzicker considering his admitted prior support of the status quo

[@vishalmishra3046]

Has anyone proposed any improvements or substitutions in the QED theory to address at least the most pressing issues with this theory ?

[@JoseSilveira-newhandleforYT]

Thanks for a very interesting video. I will check Consa's papers.

[@guanxi99]

Ok, who can explain the double slit experiment results correctly now?

[@joethestack3894]

The Stern Gerlach experiment used a beam of silver ions and a non uniform magnetic field to demonstrate quantization of spatial orientation. The interpretation involves the interaction of the orbital electron’s intrinsic angular momentum or magnetic moment with the magnetic field. But a magnetic field is a consequence of the relativistic motion of electrons , or so it can be shown. The magnetic field is a secondary effect of the electric field, but the way it arises is complex compared with the electric field. How the relativistic motion of electrons can give rise to quantization of spatial orientation relative to any arbitrary axis I find quite baffling.

[@annaclarafenyo8185]

Good that you are mystified! That's indeed the fundamental mystery that leads to quantum mechanics. This was also baffling to Bohr and Sommerfeld. The modern theory of angular momentum explains how this works, the angular momentum is quantized about any axis, but you can consistently rotate the electron, it just gets quantum amplitudes to be spinning one way or the other around the new axis. This is explained well in Feynman's Lectures volume 3, from first principles, toward the middle of the book.

[@thedouglasw.lippchannel5546]

Quantum Electrodynamics - "Fughetaboutit". Try CIG Theory by clicking on the link above.

[@andrewburbidge]

Maybe it is best to say that there has been a lot of channeled thinking; with the use of words that some find convenient because they are more consistent with a preferred view. For example, saying that a molecule has zero-point energy avoids saying that there is a transmission medium with enormous zero-point energy. Some physicists don't accept that there is a transmission medium. What is the best way to model the transmission medium? A packing of spheres with gaps such that a displacement of a sphere - a clove - gives an enormous restoring force produced by the frame energy, tending to equalise the clove density. Modeling a neutron as a spinning 4-ring and the proton as a spinning 6-ring, how does their stored Force x distance compare with the frame energy? Minimal influence at distance. Gravity is from the contribution of particles to the frame energy, causing the slowing of the motions of all mutually-influencing particles and the recentring of their motions. It is a very small force compared to the charge force. That is a great discovery of Clove Theory. All particles are wave systems and in the frame they continually undergo interference, propagating with all the energy-dependent excitations available, Why don't they dissipate completely? Spin condenses. Spin condensation counters all the mathematically doubtful, infinite-like energy claimed for electrodynamics. A linear-like excitation may be modelled reasonably as oscillating opposed spins. To be fair about it, Stückelberg's theory, an extension of Huygens' theory for any such wave system, does seem to work. What excitations are accepted in a computation may depend on the basic model, from photons, then onward through the energy scales. Once started, with some good guessing, it could be tightly constrained, leading to the depth of belief in electrodynamics that there is today.

[@sonarbangla8711]

Elsewhere i found mentioned about problems of renormalization. Only Unzicker's brilliant article made me look for the 'problem. I knew about Dyson's brilliance, but only now I discovered how nonconvergent series were at the heart of the problem and wanted to know if the problem was solved. ANNA CLARA Fenyo believes it is, but I think it isn't. However, the problem seems to me to be related to infinite axiom algorithm, if so then there is no solution. I would like to know if any solution surfaced in the last70 years, Unzicker should know.

[@TheMachian]

Thanks, the brilliant article is by Consa, btw. Yes, Anna Clara (whoever she is) is one of those "science" adehrents...

[@gerhitchman]

8:55 "there's no point in using a series that doesn't converge because it may yield nonsense" Nonsense! Just read the abstract of Dyson's paper -- the very one on the screen. In no way does lack of convergence make the theory less practical.

[@abrogard142]

you are not the first one to say this. as a complete mere layman this much at least I can understand. You have found an expert professing to be correcting virtually ALL experts to outright wrong about a very ordinary fundamental thing. Still knowing nothing of the ins and outs of the QED debate I am now convinced I do know something: this author: Unzicker? - is not to be trusted. Hence his videos become virtually useless to me.

[@rayoflight62]

Simplifying infinities in calculations is like sweeping some big problem under the rug. ..

[@brainxyz]

Because of Computational irreducibility, for observers like us, Re-normalization and Coarse-graining may be a necessary abstraction to understand the world around us even with imperfect precision as long as that "understanding" is useful for our survival.

[@benjaminfrank9294]

Very interesting ! Though i remember that many divergences are not a problem at all, since we have an error typically of (N/137)^N. Ok this error diverges. But if we take N=100, the error is tiny and that's all we need.

[@sillymesilly]

What intriguing is 137

[@jostpuur]

What about the cross sections of particle collisions? Have the theoretical predictions from QED ever been compared to empirical cross sections? When speaking about tests of QED, people always speak about anomalous magnetic dipole moment or Lamb shift, but what about the particle collisions?

[@BarriosGroupie]

I find your labelling of Lamb as a 'radar technician' at 1:40 as dishonest and disingenuous. He was a skilled theorist and experimentalist famous for the Lamb-Retherford experiment and the Lamb shift.

[@Littleprinceleon]

Seems that the maker of this video has serious ego-issues... Or just trying to sell his book

[@GH-oi2jf]

I’d rather hear Feynman’s assessment of QED in retrospect, but, alas, he is not here to give us one. I’m not taking sides, though. I’m not a physicist but know a little physics as an engineer. QED is something for physicists to debate. It doesn’t affect anyone else whichever way it turns out. My outsider’s question is: If QED is still an accepted theory, doesn’t it have some utility? If not, why wouldn’t it be discarded?

[@GilesMcRiker]

The comments on this channel are internet gold👍🏻

[@oliviercroissant4034]

I think you do not understand the true idea behind renormalization, which is effective models. we do not pretend describe in QED how things are, we describe just how things behave up to a certain precision (energy, or distance). The computations are difficults but match effectively the experimental data , in certain circumstances up to 12 orders of magnitude

[@bloodswacky94]

There is a very important fact is missing in the video: EVERYBODY in the field knows exactly that the mathematics is not on solid ground. This is true even for beginners, it is constantly made fun of in lectures etc. I think there is a misconception what a theory should be. Even if mathematical steps are not justified on a mathematical level, if you apply them and you get results that fit data with precision that chance can not explain (say 5 digits) then you are onto something. Of course general principles of logic have to be respected, for example circular reasoning has to be avoided. And it is very much so that you can compute different physical quantities with impressive precision using QED methods by yourself (at least if you spend a semester on the problem ;)). So there has to be something going right with QED but surely it's current form is not satisfactory at least for every mathematician who got a glimpse of it. But this is standard for new theories: A classic example would be classical mechanics with Newtons calculus. It was widely believed that infinitesimals are mathematically unjustified, and it took some centuries until a solid understanding of differentials emerged.

[@spaceman4286]

I agree with you. I think this video, although insightful, has a narrative more inflammatory. There isn't a big conspiracy and everyone realizes in their undergrad that a physicist's job is to describe nature as precisely as possible until someone else describes it just a tiny bit more accurate.Questioning is the correct way of going forward, and ultimately we may as well never truly learn how nature behaves fundamentally. Having theories that can predict results up to 5 decimal places is better than having no theory that can predict nothing.

[@mayatrash]

One point you glossed over: 2 things: 1. It could be, that renormalization hints to new mathematics, to be more precise, maybe infinities can be handled differently (sometimes it reminds me of projective geometry and mapping infinities to a single point of infinity - like a circle, maybe infinites can be regarded as “small” even if counterintuitive. But I’m not a mathematician, I can just imagine that mathematics is maybe a bit to bound do answer these kind of questions. This indeed would be the strongest version of your argument, but there is a different side: 2. If this is not true, than using our intuition one can state this true fact: if numbers get reasonably large, mathematics becomes incoherent, terms can be cancelled in any way which leads to a whole different snake pit: ONE CAN FIT ANY DATA ONE NEEDS. Self energies are essentially (in my knowledge) basically dividing by 0, and the whole reason it’s algebraically forbidden in most scenarios is the incoherence of maths if one allows for this. So this can’t be the whole story either way. I.e. Dimensional redularization is exactly sus because of this. I’m quite happy that I switched from particle physics to condensed matter, at least one can measure useful stuff.

[@OblateBede]

Actually, these days, infinitesimals, both nilpotent and invertible, are perfectly well-defined and rigorous. See synthetic differential geometry for details.

[@GillesSoulet]

What can you expect from physicists, the very people pretending that PI*PI=g=10...

[@tictacX1]

Dr Unzicker, are you concluding that the g factor wasn't recalculated and the derivation not dissected and discussed by the numerous PhD students over the last 60+ years?

[@TheMachian]

Being a PhD studend does not mean you are not parroting - alas, it seems the contrary...

[@zyxzevn]

Re-normalization was the first indication to me that something was very wrong. The weird orbits of electrons around the nucleus seemed unreal to me, especially when Atomic Force Microscopes showed spherical atoms. Feynmann also pushed for a particle oriented theory, where fields were constructed with virtual particles and most particles were going backwards in time. The more it all seemed like fantasy to me, and that we needed a complete different approach to the problems. I do have some ideas of how we can solve this, but that is by approaching electromagnetism with only the electric field, and no photons. So magnetism comes from some kind of relativity effect, or whatever. And photons come from thresholds in the observer. Photon explained: The Electric vibrations cause a resonance in the electron band. So the electron band collects some of the energy. At a certain time the electron-band has so much vibration that the electron moves to a different band. And backwards the electron-band can vibrate towards a lower state, causing the emission of light. In lasers we can see that the electron bands can be phase-locked with the incoming light. And the delays in the transition between quantum states shows that something is going on. (Similarly in super-conductivity, superfluids, etc) But we still need to investigate more.

[@TheMachian]

Evidently, you had a good gut feeling. I am grateful to Consa that he pointed out the deficiencies of QED in so much detail.

[@ericephemetherson3964]

@@TheMachian Mr. Unzicker! I am responding to the writings of the man (zyxzevn) you answered above and I think he has a point. Something going backwards in time is unrealistic unless we consider another force (you call it fifth force) which is time that possesses a force. Not in the sense of our psycholgical perception of it but time which is not force but has a force. We cannot detect this force because man has not constructed a contraption to ''feel'' this force nor have we got a mechanism that ''feels'' time. A clock is the worst kind of man made construct to measure time for it does not measure time at all. Time equipped with a force is not one directional but omnidirectional and it pushes and pulls in infinite angles of directions in Universe. Also, the man above points to electron jumps in orbital bands in the atom. Since every atom in the Universe has a different energy level (however minute), none of these electrons falls exactly to the same level of energy after losing it in the process of emitting a photon. The difference in these levels of energy of an electron is what keeps the Universe running. It is like imagining Misters Unzickers and only Unzickers existing in the Universe that is filled only with one kind of an entity. There must be a constant exchange in energy for a machine to keep running. These phycisists you describe who made calculations in error are only presenting conjectures and in approximate manner. On mircroscopic level we do not know on what level of energy an electron is unless we measure it right then in right place. But how do we know what that electron is doing one second after the measurement? Uncertainty principle is bowing here. All is in constant motion and erroneous data may be coming just from the fact that man cannot subdue small things as atoms. This renormalization tricks is just a crutch that saves phycisists from embarassement of their deeds. They don't know what they are talking about sometimes. Mathematicians are even worse. I will be looking for your books to buy to read because you have hit upon a very disgusting topic about these scandals for which some guys got Nobel prize. And a question for the end: what causes the speed of light?

[@ericephemetherson3964]

Mr. Unzicker! I am responding to the writings of the man (zyxzevn) you answered above and I think he has a point. Something going backwards in time is unrealistic unless we consider another force (you call it fifth force) which is time that possesses a force. Not in the sense of our psycholgical perception of it but time which is not force but has a force. We cannot detect this force because man has not constructed a contraption to ''feel'' this force nor have we got a mechanism that ''feels'' time. A clock is the worst kind of man made construct to measure time for it does not measure time at all. Time equipped with a force is not one directional but omnidirectional and it pushes and pulls in infinite angles of directions in Universe. Also, the man above points to electron jumps in orbital bands in the atom. Since every atom in the Universe has a different energy level (however minute), none of these electrons falls exactly to the same level of energy after losing it in the process of emitting a photon. The difference in these levels of energy of an electron is what keeps the Universe running. It is like imagining Misters Unzickers and only Unzickers existing in the Universe that is filled only with one kind of an entity. There must be a constant exchange in energy for a machine to keep running. These phycisists you describe who made calculations in error are only presenting conjectures and in approximate manner. On mircroscopic level we do not know on what level of energy an electron is unless we measure it right then in right place. But how do we know what that electron is doing one second after the measurement? Uncertainty principle is bowing here. All is in constant motion and erroneous data may be coming just from the fact that man cannot subdue small things as atoms. This renormalization tricks is just a crutch that saves phycisists from embarassement of their deeds. They don't know what they are talking about sometimes. Mathematicians are even worse. I will be looking for your books to buy to read because you have hit upon a very disgusting topic about these scandals for which some guys got Nobel prize. And a question for the end: what causes the speed of light?

[@crabcrab2024]

@@ericephemetherson3964 U can’t even comprehend how wrong you are.

[@ericephemetherson3964]

@@crabcrab2024 Correct. I cannot comprehend how wrong I am. But I can comprehend when I am right.

[@shreyadas5065]

Thank you very much for explaining patiently with facts and figures (as much as possible without a pen and paper). I am not a physicist. I am an engineer and PhD researcher in medical imaging. But what you mentioned at time point 11:39 about no published code really resonates with me. This is something I also find in my field, medical imaging and engineering. Increasingly, I find in current literature, there is no way of checking someone's models and findings because the codes for the algorithm are not available. Not only that, the Methods section in scientific articles are becoming less and less detailed to the point of being almost eliminated. I do not understand how the reviewers are even reviewing without knowing about the Methods?! In spite of this feeling, I have been also almost forced into reducing details (which I thought were very important) from my own articles.

[@asdfasdfasdf383]

I can't imagine not publishing the source code. I'm a software engineer, this just seems ridiculous. Completly bogus. Are these people froced to not publish somehow by authority, or do they make this decision by themselves? Whatever the case may be, it speaks against the fundamental principles of science itself. Liberate our World, Free All Information!

[@tacca2747]

I am also an engineer. I would just comment that at least in all the engineering I ever did the end result had to work.

[@yash1152]

> _i am also an engineer ...._ @Tacca engineers lol... but remember, engineering is based in scientific journal papers and theories developed henceforth, not the other way around.... engineering is just a bunch of coorporate work where u HAVE to show that this stuff works. this did not used to be true for science. but alas, coorporate *hit is ever bleaching and creeping in all areas of life.

[@NovaWarrior77]

How do we bring this to people's attention in an intelligent way? It's so unglamorous, it casts some fan-favorite physicists in a bad light and it's already hard to understand what they're proposing let alone the errors in it. But it's absolutely necessary.

[@ericephemetherson3964]

One must understand that all these caculations are conjectures and are approximate. Hence errors. Sometimes even phycisists don't know what they are talking about. Mathematicians are even worse.

[@jccusell]

How does it shine a bad light on Scientists?

[@NovaWarrior77]

@@jccusell It showcases that some of them didn't do their due diligence. The techniques used to force the theory to make predictions can give any result you want. That is the same thing as not making any good predictions. A few physicists tied to cheat to make their theory the accepted one.

[@smallpeople172]

@@jccusell they lied about how the equations were done

[@lukeneville7081]

I have come back to this video a year later with some more comments on this video. Firstly you mention that Schwinger's paper is only an approximation. This is slightly untrue, Schwinger means that he is taking the first term in a series solution in the hopes that it is enough. Next, it is true that Dyson showed the perturbation series to diverge but this is now well understood as an asymptotic series, which generally diverge but still contain meaningful information (c.f. Carl Bender's Perturbation theory book) which can be extracted through techniques such as Borel Summation. Finally in Bethe's original work he does use a `fudge' numerical cut-off on the integral but people understood at the time that that would make a big difference, and these cut-offs were understood through Ken Wilson's work on the renormalisation group.

[@philler8151]

Thanks for mentioning this. I also know Benders book and think there is in some sense still hope its not totally bad. One point I think is important is that we have this big model and we stick to it when doing lots of different calculations (so we can test the same thing in lots of ways). I hope the community is not going down the wrong path but I think if someone can find out that its a hoax (or not) its physicists.

[@Arcsfinx]

Oliver Consa’s “Something is wrong in the state of QED” is misleading, and the state of the muon g - 2 calculation has been historically controversial. (another side: the quote about fermi’s reaction to dyson is misattributed to renormalization when it is really about a well-known erroneous calculation in meson theory which was subsequently amended) The techniques used to calculate the newest theoretical /experimental value are still under scrutiny, and should not be taken wholesale as fact. Science is a human endeavor, and error (as shown in consa’s paper) followed by subsequent correction is part of the process. Physics is not always “simple,” the messiness is part of the process and we shouldn’t expect the most elegant theory to be the most “correct” one (most elegant is subjective anyway).

[@legalfictionnaturalfact3969]

No, Elegance is not subjective. It has parameters. If you are asked about a specific fact of a discipline and you try to zoom out to talk about how all of science this and all of science is that... You look like you're talking around the topic without getting exact. Physics.. or natural philosophy... Is simplex. Apply the razor.

[@yr0]

14:55 are these “E” not all different, like one is electric field one is the energy in all the mass?

[@OzzPhysicist]

I waited for this moment since I was a teenager. Since then I been convinced that QED don't make what I call "sense". My question now is: why I never seen other people talking about this?

[@user-yc3fw6vq5n]

Eh

[@christophershelton8155]

The amount of energy an electron gives off at any given moment is definitely not infinite, but the total energy an electron has the potential to give off over its lifetime can definitely be quite large for some scenarios? and what is the electron's energy source? other than the relationship it has with photons through the photoelectric effect

[@mlmimichaellucasmontereyin6765]

Why imagine an "electron" -- as a separate, discreet, independent thing? Why not get real, and consider all forms & modes & effects of E as inseparable, interdependent, interactive 'field-effects'?

[@DavidBensonActor]

As a newcomer to all this, a physics novice, I am finding your talks extremely interesting. I am being liberated of many of my preconceptions about everything. I have ordered your book and look forward to exploring your channel content.

[@TheMachian]

Welcome aboard! :-)

[@annaclarafenyo8185]

@@TheMachian Why are you lying to these people? If you read Dyson's paper, the order at which the QED series diverges is roughly the inverse of the fine-structure constant, so around 130, and we are calculating to order 4 or 5. There is no sense in your complaints, there are pure propaganda.

[@2tehnik]

@@annaclarafenyo8185 and is there a good reason to not take the series beyond the 137th factor?

[@annaclarafenyo8185]

@@2tehnik To that accuracy, quantum electrodynamics, to the best of our knowledge today, is inconsistent. But that inconsistency is UNDERSTOOD, it isn't something mysterious. It's the "moscow zero" reinterpreted by Wilson to be the degree to which you can approach a continuum limit. Long before the 130th term, you find other effects creep in, strong interactions, weak interactions, finally gravitational interactions, and the theory is replaced. When you use a string theory perturbation theory, there are no more divergences or those type of inconsistencies (there are others).

[@2tehnik]

@@annaclarafenyo8185 > Long before the 130th term, you find other effects creep in, strong interactions, weak interactions, finally gravitational interactions, and the theory is replaced. wasn't the dyson series supposed to be for a free electron? I'm just not very familiar with QED so I'm not sure what to make of this. > When you use a string theory perturbation theory, there are no more divergences or those type of inconsistencies (there are others). Is that the only way to avoid reliance on the Dyson series?

[@danmiller4725]

I noticed that Feynman diagram of a positron shows it going back in time but still forward in space.

[@loulasher]

Thank you for putting this into a proper context context. The lengths to which they stretch their bad assumptions is ridiculous.

[@Eris123451]

I'm not convinced, far from it ?

[@tinkeringtim7999]

Really well put together, quite decisive. I've spent hours trying to argue as you've argued more comprehensively and clearly in a matter if minutes. Brilliant, subscribed.

[@jpenneymrcoin6851]

the trick is to find the keystone of the argument. once i knew that renormalization was a bunch of hocus-pocus as Feynman said, i knew this theory would be coming down eventually.

[@grzegorzach3891]

Oh boy... so much BS... 1. The two-loop result for g-2 (first computed by Peterman) has been recomputed multiple times, using multiple methods (Remiddi&Laporta, recently by S. Volkov) and it is easy enough that any good graduate student can do it himself/herself within few months. Same with three-loop, same with four-loop. The very small five-loop correction remains to be computed independently. 2. The fact that the g-2 expansion in alpha is divergent is close to irrelevant to comparison with experiment. 3. First you show "hurr-durr - incomplatible values of X have been published" and then you claim "people are forbidden from publishing values which disagree with the experimen/theory/previous results). Well... do not anyone see the contradiction? Incomatible results have been published in theoretical physics multiple times - yes, some people do make mistakes in calculations - and nobody has been "ostracized" or "prevented from publication" simply by disagreeing with the previous results.

[@TheEmmef]

8:42 You exaggerate what Dyson said (even in the text that you show). Yes, it raises validity questions of the underlying theory, but "the divergence in no way restricts the accuracy of practical calculation" and "planes won't crash" as a result.

[@Bankoru]

All physicists understand that all models are temporary. There's always the one problem, the one experiment, that will lead us to new insights, and ignoring them halts progress towards better understanding. The fear is in the inability to figure these things out. QED already required genius breakthroughs in how to handle complex math. There are lots of new theories around, but we may be reaching the limits of what is humanly possible to understand and experimentally verify.

[@TheMachian]

Not all physicists understand that some models are nonsense.

[@demej00]

What a letdown. I thought scientists were objective, honest, moral - kind of good boy scouts. What does ChatGPT think aboiut it?

[@Juxtaposed1Nmotion]

lmao what? why the fuck would that matter, what a language model thinks of... what exactly?

[@Jack_Dikian]

This is a great video - Thank you! These offending theories (QED and QFT) are still actively used and serious replacements are not in sight. What has happened instead is that the "embarrassment" has gone away. We have learned to accommodate renormalization and the removal of infinities as just one of the rules of the game. Jack Dikian

[@santerisatama5409]

No replacements in sight? Hmm... Wolfram's (who knew Feynman well) multicomputational paradigm is actually a non-local hidden variable theory, when you give it some thought....

[@tictacX1]

The claim by Unzicker seems to be that the calculation were either fudged by mistake or on purpose to give the right result and that was that, nobody repeated it which is disingenuous. What do you think?

[@matsab7930]

How do you explain the fact that they work? It's not like scientists are just fucking around with theories that don't map on to reality at all, if that were the case there would be no use for this branch of theoretical physics. No, unfortunately you've been entirely duped by this charlatan.

[@santerisatama5409]

@@matsab7930 Physicist are indeed just fucking around with theories that don't map. They are wanking point-reductionistic "real numbers" which make any and all movement impossible, Zeno on steroids. So, most physicists are crazy, because most basic empirism goes: eppur si muove.

[@matsab7930]

@@santerisatama5409 that’s exactly how we are able to predict the movement of celestial bodies accurately, plan satellite trajectories through space and precisely control the strength of an electron beam; because physics is just ‘making things up’. You clearly have no understanding of physics.

[@fischX]

It would be interesting to feed all the measurements we have so far by experiment into a neural network that is trained to find the smallest possible mathematical function that explains every measurement. If the status q is true it should give out the standard model

[@TheMachian]

Nice idea but I guess we are not there yet. See kzbin.info/www/bejne/aHuQnWttbJaVbLM

[@yash1152]

the measurement data fed in to the AI/NN has to be correct though lol, not fudged around.

[@DKFX1]

Hello Mr Unzicker. I just revisited your video and mused myself reading the comments. I just wanted to let you know that all your efforts of raising concern about these theories is well appreciated and well-founded. I am among one of those individuals that have put great effort and energy into building a serious alternative model of atomic physics. The work has been on hold for a period of time, but great strides have been made, probably much beyond your reasonable expectation. You seem like a rare breed of physicist with healthy skepticism towards modern particle physics approaches. You are a leading physics expert of our time. Why - you might ask. It is because you have a great talent for recognizing what good physics is what it is supposed to do, and simultaneously you easily recognize what bad physics looks like and have a willingness to be frank about it when you observe it. This combination of attributes is seemingly very rare and makes you a very valuable voice in the conversation about modern theoretical particle physics.

[@waynelast1685]

Maybe because too much averaging is going on and we need QFT (relativistic) to explain?

[@radiofun232]

A very interesting video. I like your idea's and have subscribed to your channel. One advice: use a better microphone and/or do something regarding the audio quality of your video's; the audio "drowns" in a certain way.

[@TheMachian]

Ok, thanks, I'll try!

[@brunkonjaa]

Maybe it would help to consider crazy idea that removes bottom size limit on matter. No bottom limit. Any interaction measurable with any instrument demands physical carrier which means "that" we call field is in fact a lot of currently invisible (due to inadequate technological advances)smaller building blocks of matter. Actually, it makes perfect sense to only speak in terms of actual 3d objects interacting with each other. Energy and field are two concepts, or to be more precise two names given to phenomena we currently can't directly observe - we only perceive "it's" influence on other particles of matter that are big enough to be perceived. Allowing for size to go on indefinitely "down" can only make sense of many observed interactions. Smaller it is, more powerful it gets - consider force difference between handgranade and and equally sized atomic bomb. So, no bottom limit, strictly 3d object interaction, speeds way faster than speed of light to explain billions and billions of interactions before it becomes noticable on our scale size as for example push between magnets. So there, crazy idea.

[@Obladgolated]

Perhaps it is also useful to recall the era in which QED emerged. In the post-WWII atomic physics boom period. physicists were suddenly superstars, with unlimited funding opportunities and the attention of the most powerful political personalities in the world. In such an environment, confirmation bias and group-think becomes a survival mechanism. Or, in the words of Guido, a character in the 1983 American teen coming-of-age movie _Risky_ _Business:_ "In times of economic uncertainty, never ever f*** with another man's livelihood." The physicists of Richard Feynman's time were smart enough to figure that one out, just as they are today.

[@mlmimichaellucasmontereyin6765]

OMG!!! This is equivalent to the best of all possible confirmations & explanations of why Alex's diagnosis is valid (mass-insanity). Yet, Alex failed to cover the pandemic-systemic corruption factor endemic to materialistic capitalist kleptocracy. Thanks & bravo O!!!

[@markhughes7927]

5:00 Occam’s anti-razor!😂 (Also 7:48 one notices 2D representation for what ‘must be’ events which are inherently 4D - i.e. on four spatial planes (those of the tetrahedron) simultaneously. Feynman’s illustrations have triangularity about them which is a step up from Faraday’s which base themselves on squares. Not one in any way qualified to comment but do know that as 2D planar hexagons will extend forever as much as any square grid as representations of ordered space but if the useful/theoretical 2D be extended to physical actuality there is a choice as to how one represents that. One choice - and that the implicit one for general understanding of volumetric actuality - is a cubic grid extending in three directions for ever; the other is cube-octahedral extension which = 4x the 2D hexagonal form of planar array. 2 points: 1 - the cubeoctahedral form neatly arranges four great circles offset at 60° from each other or four hexagons if connecting the centres of 12/13 (one central) spheres to represent the form; 2 - the cubeoctahedral form does not exclusively articulate ‘all-space’ by four triangular arrays but - bogglingly - by three offset square arrays simultaneously. This difficulty may easily be resolved by considering the form of the octahedron in modular extension - a square grid from its midriff and four triangular/hexagonal spandrels from its sides. More clearly still envisage the form as an association of three squares and extend them while knowing that the same result will occur from envisaging the extension of four planes of triangulated hexagons.)

[@rafitiki]

I’m not commenting about the rest, but wkb series are usually divergent yet Borel summable so Dyson’s argument does not quite hold ;)

[@philiprose5895]

This zigzagging would be Zitterbewegung as found by Schroedinger and explains the anomalies without virtual particles and vacuum energy (apart from Higgs expectation value). Puzzles me that neither Penrose or current Fachleute have spotted this. It would be nice to have a theory explaining inertia, mass and anomalies without recourse to magic particles and misuse of Heisenberg indeterminancy. Hestense studied Zitter closely and produced an elegant phenomenology but missed the connection to electro-weak theory. Appreciate your view. Sorry for truncation!

[@annaclarafenyo8185]

Zitterbewegung isn't from Schrodinger, it's from a bad interpretation of the Dirac equation in the 1930s. The high frequency components are positrons.

[@max_mel1]

@@annaclarafenyo8185 Interesting! You have a source?

[@annaclarafenyo8185]

@@max_mel1 This is well known from the 1930s, I genuinely forget the authors, but this is why "Zitterbewegung" disappears from the literature, people understood that the one-particle interpretation was untenable. Probably the best source for this change is Klein, but the 1930s field theory papers are nowadays unreadable, because they are pre-Feynman, pre-Schwinger.

[@observing_paradoxes]

I personally see renormalization as a (poor) way to localize a fundamentally non-local theory. I believe it is possible that all the divergences in QED arise from the electromagnetic vacuum (and thus the whole field) being described as a global manifold in energy space. Renormalization just "localizes" the energy space. Arbitrarily selecting the ball over which the energy is localized is not a good way to select an appropriate neighborhood. QFT needs to be localized and GR needs to be delocalized a little. The boundaries need to be well defined somehow. I don't agree that renormalization is nonsense...it arises out of necessity. Is it good? No. Is it not physical? No. Infinite spaces are hard to deal with. That doesn't make it wrong, it is just not quite right.

[@Littleprinceleon]

The end of your pondering with the questions "Is it good? Is it not physical?" reminds me of Hindu mā-jā: "Is the world real?" Not that! "Is the world an illusion?" Not that! Just replace "world" with "wavefunction"....

[@jupytr1]

Consa says in his paper "However, the Riemann function is defined only for positive values, since for negative values the Riemann function diverges to infinity. The Riemann function of -1 is equal to the sum of all positive integers. " however that is false as the "Riemann function" is defined everywhere except for a simple pole at 1.

[@TheMachian]

I guess this is just a typo; however, it does not affect the validit of his argument.

[@haroonrasheed3844]

If inifities were indeed replaced arbitrarily by quantities as Dirac and co claim, how can QED possibly be true?

[@GordIsKing]

Your assertions remind me of the work of Mendel Sachs. I'm wondering if you've heard of him. He was a theoretical physicist at University at Buffalo whose opinions of QED were similar to your own. He developed his own nonlinear field theory inspired by Einstein's own work and made many remarkable claims for it. It did not suffer from infinities and he was able to show that QED was a linear approximation to it. He was widely seen as a "crackpot" but I haven't come across anyone who has formally refuted him. I think he did make some claims though that have turned out to be wrong regarding black holes, the twin paradox, gravitational waves. But I'm not sure these wrong predictions are a necessary outcome of his ideas.

[@rayraytub1000]

What would Professor Gerald Gabrielse think?

[@TerryJLaRue]

Finally, someone competent to say the things I have thinking for a long time. While I spent my career in law, I always enjoyed science, and especially physics/math. I have used much of my retirement time in that study. I have often read "explanations" in physics that have the ring of a fudge factor. Sometimes after reading something on the inflation theory, dark matter, dark energy or quantum mechanics, I think, "Seriously? Do you guys just make up this crap as you go along?" Sabine Hossenfelder wrote a book called "Lost in Math", which looks at much of the unprovable rabbit hole theories of modern physics. It is a good, if depressing, read.

[@annaclarafenyo8185]

You are wrong, and so is this commentator. He doesn't understand how field theory calculations work, or how asymptotic series work. The calculations in QED are also relatively easy to check, you can automate the lowest orders in symbolic packages, and the integrals are not that hard to do. You can calculate the lowest order correction by hand in an afternoon, like Schwinger did. This stuff isn't easy, but it isn't nonsense.

[@annaclarafenyo8185]

@Phumgwate Nagala It's not "too complicated to understand", if you dedicate yourself, you can learn it quickly, and it's extremely interesting.

[@secretagent7888]

Particularly dark matter and enrgy I see as epicycles. I'm glad I came across Unzicker, at least I am nt alone in being at least a bit suspicious sometimes. QED was just too neat a name for this branch of physics and I just didn't believe how neat and tidy it all was. It was rather like assuming a spherical horse.

[@annaclarafenyo8185]

@@secretagent7888 Your opinions are ignorant of the experimental and theoretical situation, you just are going by your gut feelings. Dark matter and 'dark energy' (cosmological constant) are both real and measured, they are not mathematical artifacts. QED is NOT "too neat", it's INCONSISTENT. The propaganda about 'good match to experiment' (which it is) was to DISGUISE THAT IT IS INCONSISTENT. Also, everyone knew QED was inconsistent since the 1950s when Landau argued it. But they also knew it was insanely accurate, because the charge on the electron is so small. This was the shouting match in physics in the 60s: "It's inconsistent!" "But it's ACCURATE", "But it's INCONSISTENT!", "BUT IT'S ACCURATE!!" and so on to ever louder volume. That was the debate on quantum field theory which lasted until 1974. Modern field theory was born in 1974 with QCD. Unlike QED, which is inconsistent, QCD is FULLY CONSISNTENT, but our calculations so far inside them are horribly inaccurate. That's because of lousy mathematical methods.

[@s.l5787]

@@annaclarafenyo8185 Dark energy has never been measured directly. It was calculated according to sum rule. And it does not match what we expect from quantum field theory by a ridiculous order. The evidence of supposed dark energy rely on a false 100 year old cosmological model which many like Subir Sarkar points out is undoubtedly the wrong approach. The evidence for dark energy turns out to be far weaker than it seemed in the last 5 years even though some still desperately cling to the idea.

[@hansvetter8653]

SRT says that a photon has mass (m=E/c²), but how can this be (even as a wave) by having a length of ZERO NULL NADA ... ?!? ... ;-)

[@tacca2747]

Thank you for your very interesting videos. It's about time someone calls out the almost 100 years of seemingly getting nowhere in physics.

[@yash1152]

ppl are calling out... this video is an example... now it seems its about turning the tables...

[@onderozenc4470]

QED theory is only consistent in nuclear dimensions where the Electromagnetic interactions among the quarks are confined into nuclear dimensions (similar to general theory of relativity) resulting in the field condensation called "gluons".

[@TheMachian]

By this stage, the quark-parton model was in danger to becoming more elaborate than the data which it was intended to explain. A critic could easily assert that the sea quark and gluon components were simply ad hoc devices, designed to reconcile the expected properties of quarks with experimental findings. Field theorists could argue that the sea and glue would be required in any sensible field theory of quarks (although they had no actual candidate for such a theory...). (Andrew Pickering)

[@onderozenc4470]

@@TheMachian OK buddy, by all means I believe that nuclear force can be best explained by the General Theory of Relativity"s paradigm of energy density which results in the condensation of the electrostatic energy in the form of "gluons". Yes, the gluons are indeed the condensed form of the energy that will soon be called the "sixth form of matter".

[@charlesmain9938]

Having stumbled upon this channel for the first time today, and not having viewed any other of your presentations, I'm curious as to what your feelings are as to the use of the concept "emergent" in physics, cosmology, and the like. Would you agree that the scale at which a process is viewed determines what rules apply? (not a physicist or mathematician)

[@TheMachian]

There are people pondering about fundamental physics phenomena emerging from complex dynamics. Sounds interesting, yet I follow other paths. Consider reading Robert Laughlin.

[@mykofreder1682]

The continuation of the series without feedback from experiments for doing this is just creating equations to fit the numbers, string theory seems to have taken the same approach. At the large scale with interaction that have been proven is good for an estimate, all the additional interactions no one has created and proven is just a series of fudge factors. There are things going on that no one will ever understand, but you can't assign fake numbers and explanations to things you don't know about or have measure. A lot of the interactions are with gravitational plasma which may be separate from atomic physics, may never be measured and be in a different dimension. Everything with mas produces an additive gravitational effect that travels out in all directions at the speed of light and even black holes can contain it, obviously something is going on with every subatomic particle and it changes when particles get together, are the particles drawing their energy in an exchange with this this plasma.

[@haushofer100]

Look, QFT is mathematically-formally ill-defined. I think no sane physicist thinks otherwise. But it agrees spectacularly with experiment. The fact that renormalization works, is kind of a miracle and certainly not a matter of underconstraining and having the freedom of tuning parameters to agree with experiment. Once you've fixed, with your favourite regularization scheme, one process, the theory should predict processes along all the other energy scales. And surprise: it does. We understand this miracle nowadays in terms of the effective field theory paradigm, which is nowhere mentioned in this whole video! Claiming that this process is trivial is a misunderstanding of the theory. If Unzicker does not agree: make a video, perform a specific renormalization and show us where things go wrong instead of pointing to works of other people. That's dishonest and lazy. QFT is already a dippy framework on its own. We quantize a classical theory, like the electromagnetic field, because we humans are classical creatures. But nature isn't. So it's highly unnatural to start from a classical theory and "quantize it". The reason it works, is basically the highly succesful divide-and-conquer strategy and separation of energy scales in nature. So thank you for that, Kenneth Wilson. Apart from that, we integrate in all those Feynman diagrams up to infinity, pretending that spacetime remains smooth at arbitrarily small length-scales. It's not, of course. We even start like that in a background dependent matter in String Theory, because we don't know how to do it differently (exceptions: non-commutative spacetimes or Loop Quantum Gravity, coming with their own problems). So with all those caveats it's not surprising that QFT is ill-defined. But that doesn't mean we cannot extract physically measurable properties from this approximation! Again: this is highly non-trivial. If Unzicker claims this is merely a question of tuning parameters or wishfull thinking: show us mathematically in a video. Perform the math. Do the calculations. That's how you do physics. You're not doing physics. You're doing a populistic history review to backup your own agenda. That's dishonest.

[@TheMachian]

If something is dishonest and lazy it is refuse to read Consa's papers and continuing to parrot how spectacularly QED agrees with experiment.

[@haushofer100]

@@TheMachian I don't parrot. I do calculations. Unlike you.

[@orthoplex64]

@@haushofer100 Please make some QFT videos with calculations. I, like many, have been starving for a better understanding of QFT. Your piano videos from several years ago are quite nice but I'm sure explanatory physics videos would be widely appreciated as well. I subscribed to you just now, so I'll be notified and will watch any coming videos.

[@haushofer100]

@@orthoplex64 I've thought about making some YT content on my own, so who knows! Funny you remember my piano pieces, I haven't l listened to them for many years :D

[@muskyoxes]

"That ramshackle structure" keeps solving real problems. Any replacement will only be on the margins

[@TheMachian]

Imaginary problems. Name a real one.

[@muskyoxes]

@@TheMachian Building really small electronics and knowing what we're doing. If it turns out that QED is not involved with that and has had zero practical use in any engineering to this day, that would be something that popular science really should have mentioned. Failing that, simply the wikipedia on "precision tests of qed" has more on it than a 1950 paper.

[@Burevestnik9M730]

Those equations are really nice. If only I could understand them

[@TerryJLaRue]

Don't worry. The writers of the equations apparently didn't understand them either.

[@annaclarafenyo8185]

@@TerryJLaRue Every competent physicist understands this elementary nonsense. It doesn't take that long to learn it, a year or so, not as long as it took you to learn to read.

[@Burevestnik9M730]

@@annaclarafenyo8185 between going after equations and going after skirts I chose the later. not everyone can be Feynman to have both

[@rebekalandwehr7886]

Until QED accepts that antimatter has a negative mass as suggested by the Thomas Theory of Conservation of Symmetry ie electrically charged matter can have a positive or a negative sign, magnetic matter can have a N or S pole and the mass of matter can have a positive or a negative gravitational sign, in other words matter in our galaxy has matter with a positive sign thus F = G(+m)(+m)/r {F = attraction} and an antimatter galaxy has a negative sign on the mass thus F = G(-m)(-m)/r {F = attraction} so half the galaxies we image contain positive matter and half the galaxies we image contain negative matter however they both look identical to the telescope. These galaxies will never annihilate because they repel each other. No need to look for Dark matter that the telescopes can't see. Look for galaxies that repel each other. No need for extra amount of matter over antimatter after the big bang. Both exist due to Conservation of Symmetry. Easy proof. Put an electron gun on a platform in orbit. Fire the gun. The electron beam will orbit the planet. Put a positron gun on the same platform. Fire it. The positron beam will be repelled into space instead of orbiting the planet.

[@ZeroOskul]

Hello, Professor, Have I invited you to look at "Lightning in Super Duper Slow Motion"? This and similar videos seem to show instrument recordings of the atmosphere's reaction to the activity of a quantum Gamma Photon. You can apparently watch the photon spread as a wave of nodes and then collapse to a definite state and sometimes (in other videos) into two definite states. If we saw no wave we could assume that alternative pathays were being written in alternate worlds and this would give reason to trust "Many Worlds". But seeing a wave and its collapse seems to really strongly buttresses "Copenhagen". Ciao! Allex

[@mlmimichaellucasmontereyin6765]

Definitions, terms, maps, and models are not the territories, nor the realities they fractionally seem to represent. Also, what you "See" is what you get. So, what you "do" with maps, models, and EWAGs is your own affair (and/or personal mental fiction, or whatever). Rite?

[@preis55]

The extension of the diagram techniques to Condensed Matter Physics by the Russians in the late 50s early 60s seem to predict the superconducting, magnetic and the Kondo transition, and associated thermodynamics of these phases, starting with the correct Hamiltonian. Feynman also said in 64, "that no theory can be proven right, because tomorrow's experiments can prove what you thought right to be wrong, we can only be sure that our guesses are wrong."

[@sdwone]

To be honest, when I was grappling with QED renomalization techniques for the first time, during my MSc course at Imperial College in the late 1990s, I had this nagging feeling that this was all just a mathematical fudge! And that we only got "accurate" results based on a fluke! Well, when you're combining infinite quantities that magically cancel out to give you the result you wanted... What else can you call it?! And now with these new muon anomalies? Time to go back to the black board methinks!!!

[@spaceman4286]

I think that's pretty standard otherwise we wouldn't make any progress. Physics' history is more or less of eventually going back to the blackboard. Remember the luminiferous aether fiasco? That theory began in its infancy back at 17th century in order to explain the propagation of light, even Newton argued for it, and the final shot was given by Michelson and Morley with their experiment. Was it truly over? Of course not, it took 10 more years until we got a theory of relativity that could explain more coherently and agree better with the experimental results. QCD might have its weaknesses but so does every theory in physics, at least as far back as the 17th century.

[@chanrasjid8688]

The algebraic operators operate only on operands. Infinities are not algebraic operands. Chan Rasjid Kah Chew.

[@jasonc0065]

And I am curious if there are similar scandals in pure maths?

[@TheMachian]

Good question! There is a mathematician - can't remember the name (D..?) - who doubts the consensus regardiung mathematical proofs. I really don't know, but I think, at least hope, the situation is better than in physics. They have, after all, the harder facts.

[@jasonc0065]

The situation is indeed better. ZFC might be questionable, but it at least doesn't have the dippy process of renormalization, and it has not historically led to logical contradictions.

[@u.v.s.5583]

There are always alleged proofs hanging in the air since nobody has the time to verify them and classify as either correct or wrong. So there is no centralized instance of Mathematical Truth, only a wide agreement among peers. Also, of course, mathematics is not a single subject. You can, for example, take the constructivist approach and renounce all uncountable infinities. That approach loses lots and lots of theorems. So, there are many systems of mathematics, depending on the axioms you choose for, e.g. set theory with partially different set of results.

[@annaclarafenyo8185]

There is no scandal here. He just doesn't understand any physics.

[@jasonc0065]

The claims of physicists are unfalsifiable to the laymen. You cannot prove Feynman or Unzicker right. I understand enough physics to be bewildered by renormalization and the lack of a consistent theory.

[@haroldhamburgler]

Another one of these videos that make a stink about renormalization that does not cover or even mention the work by Weinberg and Salem that demonstrated that all quantum field theories are effective field theories, which explained why renormalization was required to remove these infinities. As for the early papers in QED, it not a surprise to me at least that they were some what fudged to match the experiment. As for the agreement with experiment, yes it seems that Karplus and Kroll manipulated there results to better match experiment, but results for g after them both moved the number closer and further from the experimental value at different times. Also, it is clear that any publication accepting a QFT result should require a supplement containing all diagrams used and their value whether computed by human or computer. Lastly, the Dyson paper where he proves that all Dyson series (actually for phi 4 theory not QED, but it turned out the same was true in QED) also had a latter development that dealt with this issue. It is called Borel re-summation and it is somewhat obscure, so I don’t think you excluded this fact out of malice. Borel re-summation allows you to take a divergent perturbative expansion at a non-analytic point like free field theory and turn it into a good approximation of the underlying function. It sees standard use in high order Dyson expansions. More generally, the first terms of a divergent power series can actually provide a good approximation of the underlying function if their magnitude decreases to a minimum before increasing. The magnitude of the minimum term in series sets the order of the error in the result. This is exactly the situation in QED. You can calculate that the terms in included in the series for g are decreasing in all of the examples you show.

[@TheMachian]

If you want to continue living in your illusion by inventing ever more mathematical sophistication that is physically nonsensical, then good luck with that. But do not tell me you have done the calculations.

[@haroldhamburgler]

@@TheMachian you cannot simultaneously demand mathematical rigor and shun mathematical sophistication.

[@haroldhamburgler]

@@TheMachian btw what calculation would you like to see? The g factor to second order? Since said you don’t believe I can do the calculation.

[@TheMachian]

Ok, I suggest you get the Feynman IIc graph published in a good journal first, since nobody has done it yet.

[@riadhalrabeh3783]

Great efforts... many thanks and all the best.

[@bryanroland9402]

No mention of Ken Wilson or Effective Field Theory then. You might also have said that working physicists understand the limitations of the available mathematical tools and stay within them where they work just fine.. I suppose controversy sells books and gets views. Here's the lowdown on QED and renormalization from Sean Carroll if anyone is interested: kzbin.info/www/bejne/hJ6bdYWLnNKdkMU

[@Lincoln_Bio]

Watching the linked video, I sort of see where Unzicker's coming from; Effective Field Theory is literally described as "philosophy", and this is by a guy that actually believes in it lmao Nah that was a very interesting video tbf, he's quite frank about the limitations of EFT while also giving an overview of some of its seemingly quite rigorous mathematical methods. And I will check out some of his other videos. Ta :) I suppose we could say QED is a terribly accurate approximation, but that's the best we can say about any theory at this point ;D

[@bryanroland9402]

@@Lincoln_Bio My point was that Unzicker doesn't even mention EFT. Another conspicuous omission is the work of Gerard 't Hooft which proved that gauge theories are renormalizable. What we do get in the video is words like "nonsense", "hogwash" and "ridiculous", which leads me to conclude that either Unzicker hasn't studied any physics since about 1965 or he is simply distorting the picture in order to sell books with catchy titles like "Bankrupting Physics" or "The Higgs Fake". Glad you liked the Sean Carroll video.

[@jamescook5617]

@@bryanroland9402 Thanks for your comment. If memory serves me correctly, much of the rigor in QFT was introduced from its application to solid state physics with the introduction of the Renormalization Group and such... not that I understand it... I just remember friends qualifying that nothing was quite "physical" until the quantization and renormalization were set for the theory. A friend of mine worked on quantization in the math department, it was known to Dirac that terms involving more than a square of momentum failed to quantize correctly under Dirac's canonical quantization. So, physicists have this habit of working in formalisms which may or may not have a mathematical home. Which is interesting in that it gives mathematical physicists something to do, and on occasion more careful attention to mathematics does produce new physics (Berry's Phase is the best example I know of in that regard).

[@bryanroland9402]

@@jamescook5617 Sounds like you know more about it than me. I know just enough to spot a fraud like Unzicker when I see one.

[@PabloNavarrete-jt5ro]

As a physicist that calculates Feynman diagrams for a job, the discussion by Oliver Consa surrounding this particular "missing" Feynman diagram, thus "proving" QED wrong, is complete nonsense. Below are my arguments. First, let me clarify that in research fields involving extremely complicated calculations, such as the one for the g-factor, mistakes are not only possible, but expected. This happens all the time in precision physics, which is why we look for independent cross-checks by other people, cross-checks against alternative approaches/techniques (e.g. numerical versus analytical), and internal consistency checks (e.g., gauge invariance of the complete result for the g-factor). The anomalous magnetic moment is no exception. Secondly, and most importantly, the modern state-of-the-art techniques for calculating Feynman diagrams (not only in QED, but in many other theories) are such that they allow, for example, the calculation of the 891 diagrams contributing to the 4-loop g-factor in a highly automated fashion [Laporta (2017)]. For today standards, the calculation of the "missing" 2-loop IIc diagram is rather trivial; and, crucially, we always make sure our algorithms aiming to compute high-order diagrams indeed REPRODUCE the known (correct) lower-order results. All this is standard procedure in the field, in a way that the QED prediction for the g-factor has been cross-checked innumerable times by various people (me included), specially the 2-loop result involving the IIc diagram. Indeed, the current theoretical result is in agreement in 1 part in a trillion (or more? don't even remember). Finally, without going into technical details, let me stress that for this kind of calculations we usually no longer calculate individual diagrams; rather, we combine all diagrams into a set of "scalarized master integrals", which is the reason why individual calculations of the IIc diagram are likely difficult to find in modern times.

[@walterblanc9708]

I remember hearing stuff about QED being built on sand at the start of my working life in the 80's and it sounds like it still is today. How on earth can these physicists get away with it and why has nobody corrected it from the ground up, surely with so many years and advances in technology they could work out something that did not rely on this Carte Blanche Maths? I also from time to time read about Physicists that suppossedly put Re-normalisation on a secure bedrock of respectability unfortunately nobody seems to be able to explain it in simple english. Thankyou for a very interesting video. Happy New Year.

[@alvin8391]

There is another theoretical physicist who also appears on youtube, Sabine Hossenfelder. She, like Dr Unzicker, has made serious criticisms - not of quantum electrodynamics but of string theory and the experimental expansion of reactors to ever more costly machines. Wouldn't their criticims of the state of physics provide a platform for their participation, together, in a discussion of the state of physics and how theoretical research might best progress from this point of disarray?

[@walrustrent2001]

"It"s hard to believe it is the description of the simplest particle in the Universe.". You got me.

[@Igbon5]

I am about to get PET scan. I read up on it and I am quite exited to be a source of anti-matter. However when I checked some of the mechanism the existence of quarks was taken as a given. This was Wikipedia though. Obviously the fact of the phenomena are correct but if the underlying explanations, QED ands quarks and stuff, are wrong, what is the explanation? Or, is the actual explanation yet to be discovered?

[@thorsvedenborg3456]

Thank you for the great video and reference to interesting articles by Consa. Here is a loosely related question to all: Why did physicists ignored further development of the quantum mechanical model of atom created by Arnold Sommerfeld in favor of the Schrodinger equation based models?

[@mlmimichaellucasmontereyin6765]

Dear TS - Thanks. Will look that up & get back to you with an answer/analysis.

[@thorsvedenborg3456]

@@mlmimichaellucasmontereyin6765 .

[@Littleprinceleon]

@@thorsvedenborg3456 did you get an answer?

[@michaelwallace4298]

Shelldrake pointed out the inconsistencies with the history of measurement with the speed of light. When so-called 'constants' vary, how can anyone possibly trust calculations based on these constants. He got booted off the TED talk program for such dire suggestions. Paracelsus asked, "What to do when doctors disagree?" Alexander Unzicker asks, "What if the Speed of Light varies?" Love what you do Dr. Unzicker!

[@JerryMlinarevic]

Think like a detective and you will know more than all the physics departments put together - but start from the beginning. If the fundamentals are wrong then what follows cannot be right.

[@annaclarafenyo8185]

That's why physicists have been embarrassed so often by Sherlock Holmes types coming into the lab and pointing out all the obvious things they missed.

[@marcv2648]

@@annaclarafenyo8185 I've been reading over your comments, and a lot of what you say sounds correct. You also sound very confident in your stance. Where, precisely though does Unzicker go off the rails in your opinion? In using Feynman diagrams rather than path integrals (something you mentioned in another comment)? I think you make interesting points, but Unzicker's points still seem valid to me. If you could please point out where you think Unzicker is misunderstanding things, I would appreciate it.

[@annaclarafenyo8185]

@@marcv2648 Unzicker's points were perfectly correct 60 years ago. That's why Wilson won the Nobel prize. He's out of date, that's all.

[@jdalton4552]

Alexander Unzicker is a true patriot of science and very brave and astute.

[@theoreticalphysicsnickharv7683]

It is a sad story, I am dyslexic and outside of mainstream physics maybe that is a good thing! Math should represent the geometry of a three dimensional process in my opinion. It is a good idea to look all the way back to the ideas of Ancient Greece, Plato, Aristotle and Pythagoras. Equations are a great tool, but geometry is real!

[@fukikobryant5067]

four dimensions is possible Kaluza had 4 space dimensions plus time.. it helps squeeze the energy into small volumes as in a proton.

[@nickst2797]

"But admit that earlier i had also participated in the choir parroting that QED was a precisely tested theory". Can you outline how you changed your mind about modern physics? What thought proceses or reading you bumped into that raised doubts in your mind and started researching all of this, without accepting the status quo?

[@TheMachian]

Good question, but maybe one should put it the other way: "Why did you believe all this in first place?" I think the answer is authority. I have a diary entry in 1991, that, after having watched a CERN documentary, summarizes: 'brainless measuring'. Thus the right gut feeling was there. But as a student or young physicist, it just does not pass your mind to challenge what was done by your respected and smart colleagues. Regarding QED, I would say that just the sympathetic personality and obvious intelligence of Richard Feynman convinced me that the theory he got the Nobel for could hardly be bogus. Yet if you read Cosa's (uncontested!) research, it is clear that it is.

[@nickst2797]

@@TheMachian Thank you. I have experience in physics through a related field. QM is taught in many disciplines, not just physics. I was thinking for a master's deegree in physics, to expand my knowledge. My motivation were nuclear physics, elementary particles, QFT courses. Now, you have made me rethinkk it and not pursue an education down that path, as it would be meaningless.

[@nking4584]

Oh dear... oh dear... oh dear ! ... now there is just NOTHING left which is sacred !!! STRANGE... as I went to hit the like button I saw the current number of likes was '666' ... oh dear, oh dear, oh dear... Nosmo.

[@papadiamea7330]

How can the magnitude of pi be placed as a denominator in a fraction?

[@Bankoru]

And what about analytic continuation of the Riemann Zeta function methods used in cases like the Casimir effect?

[@1997CWR]

Are you sure the Casimir effect derivation needs to use the analytic contineation of the Zeta function?