Frank Close tells the human story of how we solved The Infinity Puzzle – once the bane of physics
INFINITY. In mathematics, it’s a curiosity. In physics, it’s a disease. It reared its head back in the 1940s, with quantum electrodynamics (QED), the theory of electromagnetism.
QED’s equations predicted that the electron’s mass and charge were infinite. But physicists had already measured those values and found them to be finite. They were almost ready to abandon quantum field theory altogether, but within the decade physicists Richard Feynman, Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga independently found the solution: a mathematical trick known as renormalisation.…
