Quantum Gravity Constants
Abstract
Gravity was the first fundamental force that humanity recognized, yet it remains the least understood. Physicists can predict the influence of gravity on stars and planets with exquisite accuracy, but no one knows how the force interacts with minute particles, or quanta. The nearly century-long search for a theory of quantum gravity a description of how the force works for the universe?s smallest pieces is driven by the simple expectation that one gravitational rule should govern all galaxies, quarks and everything in between. No theory has yet proven successful in describing the general situation where the dynamics of matter, modeled with quantum mechanics, affect the curvature of space-time. If one attempts to treat gravity as simply another quantum field, the resulting theory is not renormalizable. Even in the simpler case where the curvature of space-time is fixed a priori, developing quantum field theory becomes more mathematically challenging, and many ideas physicists use in quantum field theory on flat space-time are no longer applicable.
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