Nobel lecture: A confrontation with infinity
t'Hooft G.
Early attempts at constructing realistic models for the weak interaction between elementary particles were offset by the emergence of infinite, hence meaningless, expressions when one tried to derive the radiative corrections. When models based on gauge theories with Higgs mechanism were discovered to be renormalizable, the bothersome infinities disappeared-they cancelled out. If this success seemed to be due to mathematical sorcery, it may be of interest to explain the physical insights on which it is actually based.
