Abstract
The theories of (special) relativity and quantum mechanics are two of the most fundamental discoveries of modern physics. Since the former is really a property of space-time which is supposed to be obeyed by all physical laws, it was obvious from the beginning that quantum mechanics (which was not relativistic in its original form) must somehow be reformulated as a relativistic theory. This goal was attained by 1929 by means of the method of field quantization. The resulting theory was called quantum electrodynamics (QED) which described the interaction of electrons and photons satisfactorily in the lowest order of perturbation theory. It had, however, an annoying feature that higher order correction terms were always divergent and ruined completely whatever agreement that existed between experiments and lowest order calculations. Because of this difficulty, which originates from the high energy region of momentum space and hence is called an ultraviolet divergence, QED was not taken seriously for nearly 20 years.
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Kinoshita, T. (1983). Quantum Electrodynamics and Its Predictions. In: Cutler, P.H., Lucas, A.A. (eds) Quantum Metrology and Fundamental Physical Constants. NATO Advanced Science Institutes Series, vol 98. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-2145-1_16
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