The Biggest Ideas in the Universe is a series of videos where I talk informally about some of the fundamental concepts that help us understand our natural world. Exceedingly casual, not overly polished, and meant for absolutely everybody.
This is Idea #11, "Renormalization." When you include particles in Feynman diagrams of all possible energies, you often run into infinite results, which are clearly wrong. The modern approach to this problem is to work with "Effective Field Theories," in which we admit that we only understand physics up to some cutoff energy scale. While enormously successful, this EFT paradigm also runs into issues with the Higgs mass and the cosmological constant.
My web page: http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/
My YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/seancarroll
Mindscape podcast: http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast
The Biggest Ideas playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrxfgDEc2NxZJcWcrxH3jyjUUrJlnoyzX
Blog posts for the series: http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/category/biggest-ideas-in-the-universe/
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