Mueen Nawaz wrote:
>     There's the whole issue of "renormalization" to deal with infinities 
> in physics. I won't go into any detail as I've never formally studied 
> it. But it's another often cited example of "fishy mathematics".

I understand it enough to explain informally. When you're calculating 
the probability of an event, you have to take into account every way 
that event could occur, and add them up. So maybe the photon leaves the 
candle and hits the film. Or it leaves the candle, splits into an 
electron and positron, which then later recombine into a photon, which 
hits the screen. Or it splits into an electron and positron, and the 
positron goes off to the Sun back in time to combine with an electron 
there, which makes it turn into a photon which happens to come back to 
Earth which strikes the electron which pushes it into the wall which 
emits a photon which hits the film. And so on.

So basically, you're adding up more and more events of lower and lower 
probability. And it turns out that if you add them all up, you get 
infinite probability everywhere.

But if you stop at, say, 10^-50 probability, and then renormalize 
(something like divide by 10^-50), you get a number. And if you stop at 
10^-60 and then renormalize (something like divide by 10^-60), you get 
the same number. As long as you renormalize to where you stopped, you 
get the same number. But nobody knows why you have to stop, and there's 
so far no physical reasoning as to where you have to stop.

Speculation is that space is actually quantum, so the mathematics of 
"real numbers" breaks down because they can get smaller than reality. 
Which is where the Plank's constant seems to come in - speculation that 
it's describing the quantum of size.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     "That's pretty. Where's that?"
          "It's the Age of Channelwood."
     "We should go there on vacation some time."

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