ʻAbdu’l-Bahá’s Tablet of the Universe
Through the Lens of Renormalization Group Theory
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In June of 1947 a group of eminent physicists gathered together on Shelter Island in Long Island New York. The group included the likes of Richard Feynman, Oppenheimer, Von Neumann and Teller. The godlike and terrible power unleashed by the collective efforts of many of these physicists was still fresh in the minds of the American public. Upon arrival in New York, they were regarded as celebrities and provided a police escort in their bus drive to the eastern end of Long Island. Before taking the ferry from the town of Greenport to Shelter Island, they were treated to a grand dinner hosted by president of the Greenport Chamber of Commerce John C. White — a grateful former marine in the Pacific war.
They collectively had been struggling for the past 15 years to apply quantum mechanics to describe the interaction of light and matter. This theory was known as Quantum Electrodynamics or QED. One question of particular interest at this meeting dealt with the finer details of how hydrogen absorbed light. Recent experimental results were presented at this conference by Willis Lamb and Robert Retherford. Their experiment had shown that two energy states of the hydrogen atom, which should have the same energy according to the Dirac equation, differed slightly. Oppenheimer and Weisskopf suggested that this might be explained as due to vacuum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field, yet it was unclear how to calculate these effects without getting infinity as a result.
From left to right, standing, are: W. Lamb, K.K. Darrow, Victor Weisskopf, George E. Uhlenbeck, Robert E. Marshak, Julian Schwinger, David Bohm, From left to right, seated are: J. Robert Oppenheimer (holding pipe), Abraham Pais, Richard P. Feynman, Herman Feshbach.
Since the development of the Schrödinger equation in 1925, Paul Dirac had devised a version of this equation which obeyed special relativity, explained the origin of the electron’s intrinsic magnetic field, and to boot predicted the existence of antimatter. However, the Dirac equation clearly showed that a field approach was necessary. This is because when relativity is combined with quantum mechanics (as happens in the Dirac equation), particles and energy now have the possibility of arbitrarily disappearing and appearing from the vacuum. In the field theory view, all of space is permeated by various…
