Why Nostr? What is Njump?
2025-01-04 01:23:44
in reply to

John Carlos Baez on Nostr: nprofile1q…cvgna wrote: "Is it not a little strange that GR is so well-defined in ...

wrote: "Is it not a little strange that GR is so well-defined in the classical domain but virtually undefinable in the quantum domain?"

"Virtually undefinable" is an exaggeration: as I sketched out in my posts, there's a lot of work on quantum gravity, including quite reliable predictions of the first quantum corrections to the inverse square force law (below, where the term involving ℏ is this quantum correction and the other is a general relativity correction).

"What is the fundamental roadblock to quantisation?"

If we knew that we'd be in great shape.

I don't think anyone knows the "fundamental" roadblock, but one key problem is that all other quantum field theories are formulated on a spacetime with a fixed geometry described classically, called Minkowski spacetime. Gravity, on the other hand, is about how the geometry of spacetime is *not* fixed. And quantum gravity is probably about how we describe the geometry of spacetime in a quantum-mechanical way.

@𝑑𝑜𝑢𝑔𝑚𝑒𝑟𝑟𝑖𝑡𝑡@𝑑𝑚𝑚

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