哲学家的重整化
Renormalization for Philosophers
摘要：
我们有两个目标。主要的一个是阐述量子场论中重整化的思想，没有技术先决条件（第2和3节）。我们的动机是，重整化无疑是20世纪物理学的伟大思想和伟大成就之一。它也以不同的方式强烈地影响了物理学家如何构思物理理论。因此，它具有相当大的哲学意义。其次，我们将简要地把重整化与欧内斯特·内格尔对理论间关系的解释联系起来，特别是约化（第4节）。其中一个主题将是两种重整化方法之间的对比。旧的方法，从CA盛行。1945年到1970年，把可重整性作为可接受的量子场论的必要条件。在这种方法上，高能物理学家能够用公式表示出可重正化的量子场论是一件非常幸运的事，而且在经验上是如此成功。但是，重整化的新方法（从1970年开始）解释了为什么我们在粒子加速器中可以获得的能量下看到的现象是由可重整化的量子场论描述的。因为无论在更高的能量下发生什么不可重整化的相互作用，它们在可及能量下都是微不足道的。因此，新方法解释了为什么我们最好的基本理论具有一个特征，即可重整性，旧方法将其视为理论的选择原则。我们还认为，普适性，一个在重整化理论中强调的概念，本质上是熟悉的多重可实现性的哲学思想;它不会对Nagelian类的约化造成问题。
英文摘要：
We have two aims. The main one is to expound the idea of renormalization in quantum field theory, with no technical prerequisites (Sections 2 and 3). Our motivation is that renormalization is undoubtedly one of the great ideas, and great successes, of twentieth-century physics. Also it has strongly influenced in diverse ways, how physicists conceive of physical theories. So it is of considerable philosophical interest. Second, we will briefly relate renormalization to Ernest Nagel's account of inter-theoretic relations, especially reduction (Section 4). One theme will be a contrast between two approaches to renormalization. The old approach, which prevailed from ca. 1945 to 1970, treated renormalizability as a necessary condition for being an acceptable quantum field theory. On this approach, it is a piece of great good fortune that high energy physicists can formulate renormalizable quantum field theories that are so empirically successful. But the new approach to renormalization (from 1970 onwards) explains why the phenomena we see, at the energies we can access in our particle accelerators, are described by a renormalizable quantum field theory. For whatever non-renormalizable interactions may occur at yet higher energies, they are insignificant at accessible energies. Thus the new approach explains why our best fundamental theories have a feature, viz. renormalizability, which the old approach treated as a selection principle for theories. We also maintain that universality, a concept stressed in renormalization theory, is essentially the familiar philosophical idea of multiple realizability; and that it causes no problems for reductions of a Nagelian kind.
机构、总结、中文摘要均由AI分析而来，可能存在错误，请以论文正文为准。
