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Spirits and the incompleteness of physics

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In 1953, Richard Feynman ended a conference talk in Kyoto with an apology. The famous physicist seemed embarrassed—he'd left part of his problem unsolved. Feynman had been presenting on helium's superfluid phase, but phase transitions were new territory for him. After the talk however, the famously terse Nobel laureate Lars Onsager shared with the audience that Mr. Feynman is new in our field, and there is evidently something he doesn't know about it, and we ought to educate him. So I think we should tell him that the exact behavior of the thermodynamic functions near a transition is not yet adequately understood for any real transition in any substance whatever. Therefore, the fact that he cannot do it for He II is no reflection at all on the value of his contribution to understand the rest of the phenomena. This was the state of affairs in the fifties. We'd figured out quantum mechanics and relativity, yet something so mundane as boiling water1 was stumping the great physicists of th

Spirits and the incompleteness of physics Complexity, renormalization, and the spirits beyond the horizon of theory Åsmund Folkestad Jun 20, 2025 319 70 80 Share In 1953, Richard Feynman ended a conference talk in Kyoto with an apology. The famous physicist seemed embarrassed—he'd left part of his problem unsolved. Feynman had been presenting on helium's superfluid phase, but phase transitions were new territory for him. After the talk however, the famously terse Nobel laureate Lars Onsager shared with the audience that Mr. Feynman is new in our field, and there is evidently something he doesn

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