Wednesday, November 17, 2004

A Quantum-Mechanical Discription of Gravity

I do not know how much more generalized these views could have become from those who now look to what the physicists and theoreticians are doing in their questions for explaining the nature of the reality we are encountering.

If few recognize it, then it is showing us strong signals of what is to come. Some will leap ahead?



"Nothing to me would be more poetic; no outcome would be more graceful ... than for us to confirm our theories of the ultramicroscopic makeup of spacetime and matter by turning our giant telescopes skyward and gazing at the stars," Greene said.


The Elegant Universe, by Brian Greene, pg 231 and Pg 232

"But now, almost a century after Einstein's tour-de-force, string theory gives us a quantum-mechanical discription of gravity that, by necessity, modifies general relativity when distances involved become as short as the Planck length. Since Reinmannian geometry is the mathetical core of genral relativity, this means that it too must be modified in order to reflect faithfully the new short distance physics of string theory. Whereas general relativity asserts that the curved properties of the universe are described by Reinmannian geometry, string theory asserts this is true only if we examine the fabric of the universe on large enough scales. On scales as small as planck length a new kind of geometry must emerge, one that aligns with the new physics of string theory. This new geometry is called, quantum geometry."



There are two obvious routes to quantum gravity. The first, and most beaten path so far, is to formulate general relativity into a quantum field theory in which the gravitational force is carried by the exchange of gravitons. The problem is that gravitons carry mass and energy, which are the source of the gravitational field in the first place. This leads to infinities that render calculations meaningless.

Amelino-Camelia points to Glast determinations in regards to LQG, yet there is a deepr sense of what can be revealled?

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