In 1965, at the end of their classic text which became the bible of a whole
generation of particle physicists, Bjorken and Drell (1965, Chapter 19) warned
pessimistically 'Therefore, conclusions based on the renormalization group
arguments .. . are dangerous and must be viewed with due caution. So is it with
all conclusions from local relativistic field theories'. In the same year, Dyson
(1965) one of the founding fathers of quantum electrodynamics, wrote 'It is easy
to imagine that in a few years the concepts of field theory will drop totally out of
the vocabulary of day-to-day work in high-energy physics'. We know that in fact
the evolution of physics did not bear out these predictions; instead, modern
elementary-particle physics is inextricably bound up with non-Abelian gauge
theories, which are direct generalizations of the quantum electrodynamics
developed in the aftermath of the Second World War by Schwinger, Feynman,
Dyson, and Tomonaga.