Ebook: Conceptual Foundations of Quantum Field Theory

The organizer of this conference Tian Y. Cao, cannot be blamed for the truculence and peevishness of his confrerees. Make no mistake: there are some very good review articles here, but it seems whenever anyone (usually one of the philosophers in attendance) gets close to upsetting some particular theoretical applecarts - mostly the ad hoc parts of currently successful theories like renormalization 'group' and effective field theory in general - some member of the congregation gets miffed and wants to shut the discussion down. Almost like the way the cultural critics portray it! For example Fisher very boorishly cutting off Rovelli, over what?. the definition of 'ontic'?. Gee, maybe you shouldn't have signed up to be a lecturer if you don't know the terms. By the way, not only does the RG not have an inverse, since it seems to be sensitive to people making 'apt' renormalization transforms - maybe it isn't even CLOSED. There are some conceptual difficulties, but they were not addressed by the theorists: Since there are spacelike correlations between 'geminal' wavefunctions in quantum mechanics, to what extent is the cluster decomposition theorem, so beloved by field theorists like Weinberg and Wightman, inadmissible in any QUANTUM field theory?, what is the connection between a linear metric space (x+ict, in which the momentum and total energy subsist), and an affine vector space (y and z in which the e-m field subsists), and shouldn't there be transform between them?, and doesn't this have something to do with the fact that there is no natural units for length, especially volume, if one uses only 'h', 'c', 'e', and the square of the vector potential, but only if one includes 'G' - the gravitational constant? That is, Quantum Electrodynamics always uses nonrelativistically invariant 'box' normalizations for the e-m field. The philosophically inclined reader may like to check out H. Bacry's "Localizability and Space in Quantum Physics", for a second opinion on some of these issues.