[robochat]

The paper is written in scathing tones, by page 11 I was laughing at each new report of QED's 'perfect' agreement with whatever was the latest experimental result for the electron's anomalous magnetic moment although as it continued as far as page 14, it became sobering. However, the recent discrepancies are way down in the decimal points of the result now; when these calculations require 1000s of complicated Feynman diagrams and pages and pages of calculation, errors seem inevitable. My hope is that an alternative approach can be found that avoids these complicated calculations and in fact, researchers already seem to be working on this [1].

[1] Nima Arkani-Hamed - The End of Spacetime (Sep 2022) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GL77oOnrPzY

[dilap]

the fact that the calculations always seemed to be chasing the experimental result seemed the most damning thing to me

i remember from physics undergrad a million years ago that great value was put on predicting new things -- you can always find a way to fit existing numbers!

an epicycles vs ellipses kind of thing

(but of course w/o actually being expert in the topic, it's hard to really know what to think)

[cjfd]

Errors are not inevitable if these calculation are automized. And I would be very surprised if they are not.

[staunton]

Now they are. People (maybe 10 worldwide who care, I would guess) now discus disagreements of results (in some very low order decimal) due to software bugs in numeric integration code, most of which is not public...

The situation seems hardly different except which decimal place they talk about. That's how this kind of science currently progresses.