A new paper argues convincingly that Newton's constant G does not run with energy. This is a criticism of many papers that claim that such a running exists.
But one moment: the strand model also makes this point. (And Schiller does not even mention it, I think.) So his model is vindicated again.
In my understanding, the problem of coupling is conceptual, first of all. We make a conceptual error and thus get "corrections to constants". In the right approach there is no corrections to the fundamental constants and, therefore, no running.
ReplyDeletehttp://arxiv.org/abs/1110.3702
Might be, but many books show graphs of the running of G.
ReplyDeleteA constant like 137.036 is another story. Nobody believes that it is fundamental anyway.
About alpha: it is strange that it should run. The QED equations written once have it as a constant. We can safely replace it with its numerical value 1/137.036 and that's it. But they make it run, I believe, because the original QED equations are wrong. Renormalizations of constants is a modification of solutions made by people to make a wrong theory predict experimental data. In this way one invents "running constants" as fitting parameters.
ReplyDeleteThe post was about G. There is so much nonsense about G told around that it is refreshing to see somebody arguing the G does not run.
ReplyDelete