Timothy Speed (2025)
Renormalization is one of the most successful technical procedures in modern physics. It renders quantum field theories predictive by systematically absorbing divergences into redefined parameters. Despite its practical indispensability, its conceptual status remains unclear: renormalization stabilizes calculations without explicitly stating which kind of boundary assumption is thereby enacted.
This paper argues that renormalization should not be understood primarily as a technical stopgap, but as an implicit boundary operation. Within the MNO (Minimal-Non-Object) approach, it is read as a formal response to integration limits: divergences appear not as mere calculational errors, but as signals of a formalism whose local predictive power can be secured only through active boundary management.
The proposed reading neither alters the mathematical formalism nor the practical application of renormalization. It does, however, make visible that the Standard Model operatively manages its own boundary conditions without explicitly conceptualizing them. Renormalization is thus reclassified as a stabilizing, but not world-constituting, operation.
This paper functions as an interface text within a larger operator-based research corpus grounded in an autistic, recursive epistemology; its results cannot be fully interpreted in isolation.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18060365
Keywords: renormalization, quantum field theory, Standard Model, effective field theory, divergences, boundary operation, scale dependence, domain of validity, ontological closure, MNO framework, conceptual foundations of physics
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