On Wednesday, January 9, 2019 at 4:01:46 PM UTC-6, Bruce wrote: > > On Thu, Jan 10, 2019 at 7:53 AM John Clark <[email protected] > <javascript:>> wrote: > >> On Wed, Jan 9, 2019 at 1:58 PM Philip Thrift <[email protected] >> <javascript:>> wrote: >> >> >> Is the Fine Structure Constant a rational number? Is it a algebraic >>>> number? Is it a transcendental number? Nobody knows. >>> >>> >>> >>> *> Is it computable at least?* >> >> >> Because the Fine Structure Constant has a physical and not a >> mathematical definition my intuition tells me it must be computable; and >> indeed we've already computed a very good approximation of it and there is >> no reason to think we couldn't do even better if we had faster computers >> that could sum up more of those Feynman diagrams. >> > > Rubbish. The fine structure constant is not computable by Feynman > diagrams. What might be confusing you is that QED calculations of > physically measurable things like the Lamb Shift and g-2 for the electron > depend on the value of the FSC. Comparing the calculations with experiment > gives an accurate value for the FSC. the fine structure constant itself is > an arbitrary constant of nature, and not directly callable. > > Bruce >
Huh? The QED industry of computing Feynman diagrams is to find more accurate charge renormalization. That in turn is what computes a more accurate fine structure constant. LC -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
