Is empty space really empty? what is the nature of "nothingness"? and why should we be even bothered about it?
The answers to these questions dive deep into the reality of space.
find out more :
http://www.cosmicescapes.com/the-nature-of-vacuum/

Can a fibre be doped??

Apparently Weinberg's old idea of asymptotic safety is in vogue as a means to shackle the infinities of quantising gravity:

"Asymptotic safety generalizes asymptotic freedom: The latter posits that a model evolves along a Renormalization Group (RG) trajectory which emanates from the free fixed point in the deep UV, whereas the former is based on a fixed point at finite values of the couplings.

Both settings have in common that their free parameters are the relevant couplings which parameterize the devi- ation of the model from the fixed point. For instance, QCD with massless quarks only has one free parameter, namely the value of the gauge coupling at some energy scale.

Mathematically the knot is defined as the mapping of a closed curve S1 ("circle") in a three-dimensinal space. This embedding can have non-trivial linking so the linking number does not change in any smooth deformation of the curve(s) and is thus a topological invariant... as we seem to have been convinced, the world seems to be constructed from invariants.

We often deal with curves; velocity curve, electric current, and magnetic flux which when closed may have non-vanishing linking number that do not change (i.e., is conserved- topological invariants).

The knot appears everywhere: Maxwell’s electro dynamics, Skyrme theory, QCD, fluid dynamics, atomic physics, plasma physics, polymer physics, condensed matter physics, Einstein’s theory.

Here is a review..

Bjorken and Drell ('Relativistic Quantum Field-McGraw Hill 1965, out of print, on applying the formalism of local, causal fields):

"It is a gross and profound extrapolation of present experimental knowledge to assume that a wave description successful at large (10-8cm) distances may be [sic!] extended to, distances an indefinite number of orders of magnitude smaller (10-13cm).

...in relativistic theory we have seen that the assumption that the field description is correct in arbitrarily small space-time intervals has led-in perturbation theory- to divergent expressions for the electron self energy and "bare charge". Renormalisation theory has sidestepped these divergence difficulties which may be indicative of the failure of the perturbation expansion. However it is widely felt that the divergences are symptomatic of a chronic disorder in the small-distance behaviour of the theory.

...this notion of "microscopic causality" strongly forces us into the field concept. Even if there is a granularity at small distances , if we are to retain micro causality the influence of one "granule" upon the next must be retarded; the most natural way to describe this is with additional fields. The problem thus becomes more complicated, without corresponding gain in understanding...[indeed] a Hamiltonian may not exist for a non-local "granular" theory ..

There is no concrete experimental evidence of a granularity at small distances. There is likewise nothing but positive evidence that special relativity is correct in the high-energy domain....that the notion of microscopic causality is a correct hypotheses.

...it is undoubtedly true that a modified theory must have [such a] local field theory as an appropriate large distance approximation or 'correspondence'."

Nothing really changed then.

Interesting to revisit old texts - I bought this when it was already out of print in 1992. You brush over these introductory words when you are younger, no time to ponder the meaning of authors' choices, musings and the big picture; hard enough attending to the mathematical formalism. In later years all that is really accessible are the prefacing and summarising words of the authors. What a shame! The best minds of the time have parsed the mathematical frameworks for us and we barely see these efforts, which presumably many is the time, the last word written by the author.

Two points then:

1- In education, little or no research is spent on graduate learning. How best to transition the keen undergraduate to the next level of moving from appreciating theories to either tweaking or better critiquing and overhauling them?

2-A compilation of best introductory endeavours would be a worthy book.
There have been variations on this - Dawkins across the sciences, but none so focussed on fundamental physics that I have seen. Perhaps you have spotted some?

In the previous chapter we have seen that the construction of interacting perturbative quantum field theories is given by perturbative S-matrix schemes (def. 15.3), equivalently by time-ordered products (def. 15.31) Feynman amplitudes (prop. 15.51) , which are uniquely fixed away from coinciding interaction points by the given local interaction (prop. 15.42), but which involve further choices of interactions whenever interaction vertices coincide. This choice is called the choice of (“re”-)normalization (def. 15.46) in perturbative QFT.

Spin Gyroscopes

In an atomic clock, the frequency of a periodic signal—the number of “ticks” per second of the clock—is referenced to the energy difference between two quantum states-that frequency is a constant of nature. Clocks can also thus detect external fields with high sensitivity.

Atomic magnetometry exploits this field-sensing gyroscopic aspect of an atom, in detecting a shift in the relative energy between various atomic states in presence of an external magnetic field. As a spinning top on Earth “wobbles,” or precesses, due to torque from gravity the magnetic dipole associated with an atomic spin, precess at a well-defined "Larmor" frequency if it experiences a torque from a magnetic field.

Exotic (non magnetic) fields could also exert a torque on the atomic spins, but because the effects are expected to be so small, researchers must eliminate the “prosaic” magnetic external perturbations to see them.

In this paper an atomic spin gyroscope acheives a precession-frequency stability of better than 7 nHz which means that the Princeton team’s atomic spin gyroscope can sense torques so small that, in the absence of other effects, they would cause atomic spins to precess with periods of longer than four years.