# Introduction

Kadanoff's argument for the Ising model allows us to explain the scaling form of the free energy density and of the correlation length near the critical point. However, as we have seen, it is unable to predict the values of the scaling exponents ${\displaystyle y_{t}}$ and ${\displaystyle y_{h}}$ (and thus ultimately of the critical exponents), nor can it explain why universality occurs.

We will see that these problems are solved with the introduction of the Renormalization Group (done by K. G. Wilson at the beginning of the '70s), which we will call simply "RG" from now on for the sake of simplicity. The RG is based upon the correct "intuition" of Kadanoff's argument that the coupling constants of a Hamiltonian change if we coarse-grain the system (or in other words we "look" at it on different spatial scales); however, this "intuition" strictly speaking is not correct since we have seen that in Kadanoff's procedure we assume that after the coarse-graining procedure the Hamiltonian of the system has exactly the same form: as we will see, this is not true in general because new terms can appear after we coarse-grain the system.