Learning About Quantum Loop Gravity

This should get/keep your head spinning for awhile.

http://cgpg.gravity.psu.edu/people/Ashtekar/articles/rovelli03.pdf

http://www.emis.de/journals/LRG/Articles/lrr-1998-1/download/lrr-1998-1BW.pdf

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00000384/00/rcc3.pdf

http://www.spacetimecenter.org/conferences/2008/Shumelda.pdf

http://www.gravityresearchfoundation.org/pdf/awarded/1999/ellis_mavromatos_nanopoulos.pdf

http://relativity.phys.lsu.edu/ilqgs/ashtekar091906.pdf

Good topic, Mr Pink; and nice links, thank you, guest. Rovelli in particular gives attractive descriptions - and even says why he does not think it is (yet?) a self-contained theory (free variables).

It's all way over my head, of course, but as described it still feels a whole lot better than most of the alternatives. I'm wondering whether or how it might tie in with JE Carroll's insights that the sizes of known quantum effects drop out of 6-dimensional analyses (a relatively simple way of removing Planck as a free variable for EM). To my mind, 'complete success' would be if these or similar methodologies could be tied together to remove all free variables, and these predictions were then supported by observation - but that last bit might just be prejudice from my measurement background.

Way over my head as well. I'm attracted to the theory by the idea of space consisting of discrete units. The excitation states of space are hard to visualize. I'm not sure if they are saying that the excited states have larger volume or are just "different" from the ground state. A connection between volume of space and excited states of space intuitively have appeal to me as an explanation to the origins of inflation (if space is excited to higher levels when in the vicinity of matter).

I definitely think the key to reconciling quantum mechanics and relativity will be defining space correctly. Gotta go, look forward to reading more on this.