Michelson Lectures

Early attempts at constructing realistic models for the weak interaction 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. This success may have seemed to be due to mathematical sorcery, but it was actually based on physical insights, which will be explained in the lecture.