Timeline for Is Segal's notion of conformal field theory a quantum field theory in the sense of Wightman axioms?
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| Jul 23, 2023 at 1:08 | comment | added | Theo Johnson-Freyd | @DavidBen-Zvi that was a poor word choice on my part. I had in no way meant to put down Segal formalism. Indeed, it is very powerful, and does capture things that FA does not. And absolutely the different formalisms lead to different perspectives. (I do think that, after further development, Segal formalism with modular functor is morally, if not technically, equivalent to FA.) The “groping” line was based a recollection that Segal himself, when describing his thought process, said that what he was trying to do was axiomatize the operator product. He knew it looked like a cobordism… | |
| Jul 22, 2023 at 0:58 | comment | added | David Ben-Zvi | It doesn't seem to me fair to Segal to describe his work as groping towards factorization algebras. I most likely misunderstood your comment and would appreciate your perspective, but it seems to me variants of the Segal(-Atiyah) formalism are still the best understanding we have for the structure of states in QFTs, while factorization algebras provide the best picture we have for observables therein. So (despite many relations between the two) they seem to me to be capturing different aspects of QFT, and one needs both. | |
| Jul 21, 2023 at 4:08 | vote | accept | Ezzeddine El Sai | ||
| Jul 21, 2023 at 2:43 | history | edited | Theo Johnson-Freyd | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jul 21, 2023 at 2:32 | history | answered | Theo Johnson-Freyd | CC BY-SA 4.0 |