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Anyone know what the big problem in physics in the 1930s was? Not necessarily specific to the UK, but which physicists in the UK would have been working on, or aspired to crack.
Oh dear.
The big problem was that doing perturbation calculations resulted in awkward infinities when one tried to integrate over energies.
That problem was solved by Richard Feynman (yes, that one) and his colleagues by "renormalization" -- by noting that the infinities were always there, as it were, and could be subtracted out by redefining various quantities appropriately. This trick won him and two colleagues a Nobel Prize.