Criticisms of Quantum Electrodynamics

A large number of very well known foundational criticisms of QED are found in the first site that appears in googling “Criticisms of quantum electrodynamics”. The theory has been heavily criticised by Dirac, Bohr, Born, Heisenberg, Pauli, Peierls, Schwinger and Feynman, and many other fine minds. The problem of divergences has never been solved. For example.

1) Heisenberg and Pauli found that the self energy of the electron and infinite Coulomb self energy cannot be neglected and that the theory is inapplicable.
2) Oppenheimer in 1930 found that there is an infinity that does not exist classically.
3) The Dirac sea in the presence of a static electric field gives a logarithmically divergent result.
4) Heisenberg found an infinite self energy of the light quanta.
5) Kramers and Bethe in 1947 renormalized the mass of the electron but this resulted in a very tricky maze of complexity as Feynman tried to absorb the infinities, the renormalization method. The charge also had to be renormalized. Feynman in the end gave up, and described the whole thing as “hocus pocus”.
6) There is no observational meaning to bare mass and bare charge.
7) The description of field interaction takes place through free non interacting fields.
8) Bohr thought that the theory is applicable only for weak coupling.
9) Landau dismissed it out of hand as totally unacceptable.
10) It ignores the B(3) field and uses U(1) gauge theory.
11) In quantum chromodynamics the situation is much worse.

So it has hidden adjustables, hidden unobservables, and many types of infinities. It is a tremendously complicated theory even for the interaction of one electron and one photon. It relies on unobservable virtual particles. It is therefore impossible for this author to accept QED, or to accept its claims to precision, simply because it is not precise at high energies, indeed it collapses at high energies, and because there are adjustables such as mass and charge renormalization, unobservables such as virtual particles, and removal of infinities which cannot in fact be removed. Above all it is conceptually self contradictory at a basic level, and students just run algorithms obtained from other students. Nothing could be further removed from Baconian physics.

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