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What I Do Not Believe, and Other EssaysOn Elementary Particle Theory

What I Do Not Believe, and Other Essays: On Elementary Particle Theory [In 30 years the science of elementary particles has made few achievements compared with its unsuccessful essays. The recent works of Schwinger, Tomonaga, Feynman and Dyson, however, have had some success (Particularly with relativistic phenomena and the relativistic subtraction). We have here a hint that progress is being made on the formal side of the discipline – though even this work is profoundly disturbing in some of its purely mathematical aspects (Cf. also Schwarz (1954). In a recent lecture at Cambridge Heisenberg remarked how the technique of ‘renormalization’, – an important formal innovation due largely to H. Bethe, – leads to the introduction of non-Hermitean operators which ruin the unitary character of the scattering matrices. This is really a fundamental change in the theory, not simply an ingenious bit of repair-work. It is objectionable because it leads to oddities like negative probabilities and experimentally vacuous ‘ghost’ states). There could be no better time to review the situation from a physical and philosophical standpoint, even if this proves to be an over-ambitious undertaking.] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

What I Do Not Believe, and Other EssaysOn Elementary Particle Theory

Part of the Synthese Library Book Series (volume 38)
Editors: Lund, Matthew D.
Hanson, Norwood Russell
What I Do Not Believe, and Other Essays — Jan 30, 2020
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Publisher
Springer Netherlands
Copyright
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020. The first edition of this book was published by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland in 1971 publishing with ISBN-13:978-94-010-3110-3. The editors of the first edition were Stephen Toulmin and Harry Woolf. 1st edition: © D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland 1971
ISBN
978-94-024-1738-8
Pages
39 –47
DOI
10.1007/978-94-024-1739-5_2
Publisher site
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Abstract

[In 30 years the science of elementary particles has made few achievements compared with its unsuccessful essays. The recent works of Schwinger, Tomonaga, Feynman and Dyson, however, have had some success (Particularly with relativistic phenomena and the relativistic subtraction). We have here a hint that progress is being made on the formal side of the discipline – though even this work is profoundly disturbing in some of its purely mathematical aspects (Cf. also Schwarz (1954). In a recent lecture at Cambridge Heisenberg remarked how the technique of ‘renormalization’, – an important formal innovation due largely to H. Bethe, – leads to the introduction of non-Hermitean operators which ruin the unitary character of the scattering matrices. This is really a fundamental change in the theory, not simply an ingenious bit of repair-work. It is objectionable because it leads to oddities like negative probabilities and experimentally vacuous ‘ghost’ states). There could be no better time to review the situation from a physical and philosophical standpoint, even if this proves to be an over-ambitious undertaking.]

Published: Jan 30, 2020

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