K.G. Wilson and J. Kogut, in The Renormalization Group and the epsilon
expansion , Physics Reports 12, 75 (1974).
"There has been sensational progress in calculating QED, but very little progress in understanding it; and strong interactions are neither calculable nor understood."
"The early work on the RG had two defects. It had no calculable experimental consequences, so no one had to take it seriously. Secondly, the intuitive ideas were encased in a thick shell of formalism; it has required many years to peal off the shell."
" In place of consciously reducing the number of degrees of freedom, these authors substitute a prayer that an infinite sum of graphs can be replaced by a calculable subset."
K.G. Wilson, in The Renormalization Group: Critical Phenomena and the Kondo
problem , Reviews of Modern Physics, 47, 773 (1975).
" ... original Gell-Mann-Low RG theory and the Callan-Symanzik equations ... They are efficient calculational methods (for Feynman diagrams). ... They completely hide the physics of many scales. These methods are hard to follow in detail for physicists without quantum field theoretical training. "
K. G. Wilson, in Renormalization Group Methods, in Advances in
Mathematics, 16, 170 (1975).
"It (RG) is at present an approach of last resort, to be used only when all
other approaches have been tried and discarded. The reason for this is that
it is rather difficult to formulate RG methods for new problems; in fact
the RG approach generally seems as hopeless as any other approach until
someone succeeds in solving the problem by RG approach."
K.G. Wilson, in Renormalization Group and Critical Phenomena, Reviews
of Modern Physics, 55, 583 (1983).
" There are many reparametrizations of QED that eliminate the divergences but
use different finite quantities than e and m to replace e_0 and m_0.
Stueckelberg and Petermann observed that the transformation groups could be
defined which relate different reparametrizations. They called these groups
"groupes de normalization", which is translated "renormalization groups"."
S. Weinberg, in Why the Renormalization Group is a Good Thing in
"Asymptotic Realms of Physics", Essays in honor of Francis Low, edited by A.
Guth, K. Huang and R.L. Jaffe, the MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts
(1983).
" ... I say this with some bitterness because I remember around 1960 when
that book (Bogoliubov and Shirkov) came out thinking that the RG was pretty
hot stuff, and trying to understand it and finding it just incomprehensible
and putting it away. I made the mistake of not going back and reading
carefully the paper by Gell-Mann and Low, which is quite clear and explains
it all well. (Incidentally, the later text book by Bjorken and Drell gave a
good clear explanation of all this, following the spirit of the
Gell-Mann-Low paper)."
A. Zee, in It is not dangerous, subheading of "Renormalization Group
flow as a natural concept in High Energy Physics and Condensed Matter",
chapter VI.8 of "Quantum Theory in a Nutshell", Princeton University Press
(2003).
Begins with the quote
"Therefore conclusions based on the RG arguments ... are dangerous and must
be viewed with due caution. So is it with all conclusions from local
relativistic field theories" -- Bjorken and Drell, Vol. II.
and continues
"The discussions in some of the older books are downright misleading and
confused, such as the well-known text from which I learned quantum field
theory and from which the quote above is taken."