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Quote by Gerald Holton

“Even in the best times, managing science has been compared to herding cats; it is not done well, but one is surprised to find it done at all.”

Quote by Gerald Holton

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Gerald Holton
Gerald Holton

Gerald Holton is a renowned physicist known for his contributions to physics education, philosophy of science, and the history of science. His research in quantum field theory, cosmology, and scientific methodology has had a profound impact. more

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“Renormalization is just a stop-gap procedure. There must be some fundamental change in our ideas, probably a change just as fundamental as the passage from Bohr's orbit theory to quantum mechanics. When you get a number turning out to be infinite which ought to be finite, you should admit that there is something wrong with your equations, and not hope that you can get a good theory just by doctoring up that number.”

“The shell game that we play ... is technically called 'renormalization'. But no matter how clever the word, it is still what I would call a dippy process! Having to resort to such hocus-pocus has prevented us from proving that the theory of quantum electrodynamics is mathematically self-consistent. It's surprising that the theory still hasn't been proved self-consistent one way or the other by now; I suspect that renormalization is not mathematically legitimate.”