As far as him being obnoxious or arrogant, I don’t think that can be the whole story. His recently published correspondence reveals quite an empathic, warm person sensitive to the feelings of other people and ready to assist when he could. I don’t think you can easily “fake” your correspondence over a period of many years.

Bohr’s model died when something better was suggested. He is just a kid. Let him study physics in his own way. I agree with him that your requirement for identification is irrelevant. Sadly, he is already dude but don’t understand that.

Regards, Dany.

P.S. I remember studying your papers already at 80th.

“hey” is saying not that I am wrong – I seriously doubt that he has studied my papers anyway – he is just saying that I am uncool. The peculiar arrogance of HEP theorists is that, to them, “uncool” and “wrong” are are just different ways of saying the same thing. So maybe he has a future in the subject.

“Effective” field theory – that he thinks I know nothing about – makes no claims about being axiomatic. As he points out, it is just a ragbag of suppositions concerning scaling behaviour that helps one obtain ad hoc models accurate only within carefully-defined limits, and, as such, is very unsatisfying state of the physics art. It will eventually die in the same way, and for the same reasons that Bohr’s model of the single-electron atom died. But by applying labels like “crackpot” (so far only received from Lubos Motl – and discounted accordingly) to someone who is trying to find something better is just pathetic.

What I find hilarious is the kind of excuses that people use when confronted with the ridiculousness of their claims. Please tell me, how exactly is my anonymity relevant to my arguments? Except to give Chris an easy escape path? I meant what I said: I want to stay anonymous because I do not want my professors to think that I am wasting my time fighting crackpots on the internet.

Even though, clearly, thats precisely what I am doing right now.

The jury should please note that this is the first time in the entire conversation that I was being a teeeeeny bit offensive, despite the abject silliness of Chris Oakley’s claims about QFT. I think I have a right to be a bit frustrated.

I will try to resist posting further: I started this off-topic blather, and its fair that I should take the initiative to end it.

Chris, let him die quietly, if he want to.

Regards, Dany.

You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink.

Good luck!

Perhaps you are not!

Because the world is out to get me? Because I don’t want the professors to know that I am wasting time on blogs when THEY are wasting time on blogs? Because my real name is longer to type than “hey”? Because I am a closet string theorist? (We are the persecuted underdogs these days, you know?)

There are all these excellent reasons, but the only point relevant to this conversation is WHAT was said, not WHO said it. Content, over cosmetics.

> 2. You are right – by and large, people now no longer worry about the fact that they are unable
> to derive their QFT calculational tools from first principles. Is that their problem or mine?

Yours. People stopped worrying about it BECAUSE they understood what renormalization was about. So they are in fact able to derive “QFT calculational tools from first priciples”. You are trying to see quantum field theory like Feynman and company did. That is, without a cut-off. So when the cutoff is forced on you by the infinities, it upsets you. And indeed there, you have reason to be upset. The essential (and a posteriori extremeley natural) insight of Wilson was that QFT should be understood with a cutoff because we cannot pretend to understand short distance physics. What I am saying is that QFT is only an effective description at low energies and therefore, you are applying it outside its regime of validity when you are trying to extrapolate it to extremely high energies and complaining about infinities.

But I think there is one context in which your desire for a QFT without a cutoff, might have some validity. This is in the context of QCD (or any theory with UV fixed point), because QCD even though a QFT is well-defined as a theory at all scales! But still we do need a cutoff (to be differentiated from the scale at which the theory is defined) to handle UV divergences, for example in perturbative QCD. So one might ask why we need to do this since QCD should work at all scales. My answer would be that the Wilsonian path integral for QCD should be thought of as given to us from the deep UV, and the “giving” has to be thought of as happening at some scale. Physically speaking, the only thing that we have any right to talk about from our low-energy misery is the effective action with degrees of freedom corresponding to short distance physics ALREADY integrated out. The scale at which this integrating out happens is the UV cutoff of the theory.

In any event, it was nice talking to you. Perhaps you are too invested in your pet theories to change your mind, cut your losses etc., but who knows? Perhaps you are!