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Oriti's new book! Cambridge (2006) "Towards Quantum Gravity"
Daniele Oriti is a really nice young person as well as being on the frontline of QG research. He is at Cambridge
His PhD thesis contained ground-breaking quotations from Homer Simpson and Groucho Marx.
the important thing is that he writes simply and lucidly and in a not too compressed way---so you can learn from his explanations without too much pain.
Cambridge University Press has given Oriti the responsibility of assembling and editing a very necessary book. We should have had this book all along. It has been sorely missed. You can tell from the title, which is exactly the right title:
[1] D. Oriti, editor, Towards quantum gravity: different approaches to a new understanding of space and time, Cambridge University Press (2006)
thank God that is finally in the works.
the point is that there ARE a number of new (non-string) approaches moving towards a quantum theory of spacetime---and they are beginning to uncover a really new picture of spacetime.
Prominent among these are Renate Loll triangulations and Martin Reuter renormalizable QG. but there is a lot of new activity in spinfoams too (Christensen, Freidel----GFT "group field theory", also Rovelli and Smolin both embarked on fresh initiatives)
so there is a lot of ferment, and inventiveness, just now---and we really need a clearly written book that keeps track of what is going on
I first heard about this Oriti book in a paper which Oriti just posted this week.
http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0512048
Quantum gravity as a group field theory: a sketch
Daniele Oriti
jpconf; 8 pages, 9 figures; to appear in the Proceedings of the Fourth Meeting on Constrained Dynamics and Quantum Gravity, Cala Gonone, Italy, September 12-16, 2005
DAMTP-2005-123
"We give a very brief introduction to the group field theory approach to quantum gravity, a generalisation of matrix models for 2-dimensional quantum gravity to higher dimension, that has emerged recently from research in spin foam models."
My comment is that even though Laurent Freidel is the main developer of GFT as applied to QG (also Krasnov and their co-authors) I find it easier to read about GFT from Oriti. Freidel has a lean mathematical style.
Daniele Oriti is a really nice young person as well as being on the frontline of QG research. He is at Cambridge
His PhD thesis contained ground-breaking quotations from Homer Simpson and Groucho Marx.
the important thing is that he writes simply and lucidly and in a not too compressed way---so you can learn from his explanations without too much pain.
Cambridge University Press has given Oriti the responsibility of assembling and editing a very necessary book. We should have had this book all along. It has been sorely missed. You can tell from the title, which is exactly the right title:
[1] D. Oriti, editor, Towards quantum gravity: different approaches to a new understanding of space and time, Cambridge University Press (2006)
thank God that is finally in the works.
the point is that there ARE a number of new (non-string) approaches moving towards a quantum theory of spacetime---and they are beginning to uncover a really new picture of spacetime.
Prominent among these are Renate Loll triangulations and Martin Reuter renormalizable QG. but there is a lot of new activity in spinfoams too (Christensen, Freidel----GFT "group field theory", also Rovelli and Smolin both embarked on fresh initiatives)
so there is a lot of ferment, and inventiveness, just now---and we really need a clearly written book that keeps track of what is going on
I first heard about this Oriti book in a paper which Oriti just posted this week.
http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0512048
Quantum gravity as a group field theory: a sketch
Daniele Oriti
jpconf; 8 pages, 9 figures; to appear in the Proceedings of the Fourth Meeting on Constrained Dynamics and Quantum Gravity, Cala Gonone, Italy, September 12-16, 2005
DAMTP-2005-123
"We give a very brief introduction to the group field theory approach to quantum gravity, a generalisation of matrix models for 2-dimensional quantum gravity to higher dimension, that has emerged recently from research in spin foam models."
My comment is that even though Laurent Freidel is the main developer of GFT as applied to QG (also Krasnov and their co-authors) I find it easier to read about GFT from Oriti. Freidel has a lean mathematical style.
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