How Mathematical ‘Hocus-Pocus’ Saved Particle Physics quantamagazine.org/how-renormaliz… - on the "renormalization group" as a means of traversing scales...
Question: is renormalization just a handy mathematical tool to enable calculations to be done at higher scales (by truncating sums that tend towards infinity OR= averaging over small-scale parameters at some grid size)?
Or is this how nature itself works? Is there real coarse-graining across levels that grants a degree of genuinely level-specific causality? (Contra reductionism) cc @C4COMPUTATION
Also, does truncating numbers that otherwise tend to infinity in this renormalization procedure relate at all to the idea of numbers as processes from intuitionistic mathematics?
Again, is that how nature works? Are some physical parameters just fuzzy past a certain decimal place (extending into the future), until they get fixed through interaction (in what we call the present)?
Does that process of interaction cut short the extension of the processes represented by the numbers themselves? Is renormalization just nature's way of getting on with things?
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
