Virtual particles in the Nobel lecture by Frank Wilczek ------------------------------------------------------- The Nobel lecture by Frank Wilczek at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1150826/ talks near the beginning about the traditional virtual particle picture: ''Loosely speaking, energy can be borrowed to make evanescent virtual particles''. Note his qualification ''Loosely speaking'', which indicates that this cannot be taken seriously. He also says why - because one encounters divergences once we try to take them seriously. Then he gets more serious and shows how renormalization fixes the problems, though he does not say that this comes at the cost of making the virtual particles infinitely heavy, and hence again physically meaningless. But this can be easily deduced from the description of the renormalization procedure in any textbook on QFT. Later, he slips back into the traditional jargon since it provides a vivid intuition about Feynman diagrams -- especially for the many nonexperts in his audience, but again he does so with a careful, explicit caveat: ''(I'm being a little sloppy in my terminology; instead of saying the number of virtual particles, it would be more proper to speak of the number of internal loops in a Feynman graph.)'' Towards the middle he mentions lattice discretizations, and how they cope with the problem in a nonperturbative way by not invoking virtual particles (i.e., formally correct, a loop expansion) at all.