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pragmatist comments on Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 3 - Less Wrong
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I wasn't complaining to anyone. And I don't dislike the question. I was just adding some relevant information. Anyway, I did reply directly to komponisto as well. See the end of my long comment above.
If we did not have independent evidence that QFT breaks down at the Planck scale (since gravity is not renormalizable), I might have considered the Landau pole a conceptual problem for QFT. But since it is only a problem in a domain where we already know QFT doesn't work, I don't see it that way.
I don't think that's the normal use of "conceptual problem."
If physicists believe, as their verbiage seems to indicate, that QED is a real theory that is an approximation to reality, and they compute approximations to the numbers in QED, while QED is actually inconsistent, I would say that is an error and a paradigmatic example of a conceptual error.
What does it mean to interpret an inconsistent theory?