What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists

Re:What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physic... by noobermin on Friday August 12, 2016 @12:44AM (#12273436)

Honestly, just because many particle physicists feel okay at this point what Feynman called 'hocus-pocus' doesn't mean it really is okay. Mathematically, it's just as unsound as saying the sum of all integers is -1/12.

There have been attempts at avoiding the regularization magic altogether but from what I gather, they are developments from mathematicians, and physicists don't really care about it.

EDIT: I knew it was a magic related term, not black magic.

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Re:What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physic... by selimthegrim on Friday August 12, 2016 @10:08AM (#12275721)

Care to enlighten some of us unwashed? I'm a physics grad student and I certainly learned things like Borel resummation in school (er, it was in textbooks they assigned us on QFT at least...)

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Re:What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physic... by Confusion on Friday August 12, 2016 @02:26AM (#12273697)

  Mathematically, it's just as unsound as saying the   
  sum of all integers is -1/12.

But that is not unsound at all: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/does-123-...

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