Well if it’s about QED I’m always drawn to the paper : “There’s something rotten about the state of QED” by Oliver Consa (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2110.02078.pdf). Since I’m in CS, not physics could anyone let me know if the paper above is making stuff up. If not, then it does paint QED in a very bad light and indicates something wrong with that field
Errr, that reminds me of a paper I reviewed. It was a favour for my daughter who doing a post-doctoral Uni course, who was asked to write a review of it for an assignment. She could not make head nor tail of it, which was surprising as she is is pretty strong at maths.
After maybe two days or dusting off my old statistics text books and numerous google searches I came to the conclusion the statistics they used were, as far as I could tell, complete rubbish. It looked like someone got themselves a (very small) data set by posting out a questionnaire, crunched the data by mashing together a grab bag of sampling techniques + distributions + significance tests, polished the result them by using the usual academic style of a numbered lemmas and "proofs", and served up the result which happened to match the latest management fad.
But we were both full of self doubt - why would a Uni course ask read something like this? Fortunately her father-in-law had a PhD in statistics, and had lectured at a major Uni for a while. So we asked his opinion. It was the same.
Which left us in a difficult position. We both suspected the point of the assignment was to demonstrate she could read complex material and learn from it. I' afraid I wimped out with "I'm an engineer, I'm not cut out for this sort of thing". I'm not sure what she wrote, but she got a distinction for the assignment. Oddly, I now think it was a good learning experience in management.
But the maths of QED has always been beyond me so I always just taken what the physicists said about the accuracy of their models at face value. If I had of read "calculated that the sum of all positive integers is not infinity but -1/12 ... and this is precisely the value that is used in the equation of the Casimir effect" a little earlier, I might have been a little less sanguine.
