Reminiscences about Many Pitfalls and Some Successes of QFT Within the Last Three Decades

TL;DR

This paper reflects on the challenges and successes in quantum field theory over the past thirty years, highlighting the stagnation and ongoing crises despite its historical innovation and importance.

Contribution

The paper provides a critical retrospective on the difficulties and achievements in QFT, emphasizing the contrast between its past innovation and current stagnation.

Findings

QFT has experienced significant stagnation and crises.

Despite challenges, QFT has historically been highly innovative.

The paper offers insights into the pitfalls and successes of QFT.

Abstract

Laymen and sometimes even physicists think of natural sciences, in particular of theoretical and mathematical physics often as subjects, which unfold according to an intrinsic logical pattern, with the limitations being set only by the conceptual and (in case of mathematical physics) mathematical developments of the times. This view certainly cannot be maintained in view of the present stagnation and crisis which in particular affects QFT, an area which in the past has been most innovating and fruitful, also in relation to other important areas of theoretical physics.