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The Kodama state has been the "If-Only" of post-string Quantum Gravity for several years, since Smolin's 2003 paper "Quantum Gravity with a Positive Cosmological Constant" if not before.
As in----if only the Kodama state was normalizable, if only we had the Kodama state then we would have a nice classical limit and all our problems would go away or at least be much much easier!
You might want to call it the Holy Grail of background independent QG, but the thing about the Holy Grail was that a whole lot of people went optimistically out to look for it. But in 2003 people were kind of scared off the Kodama because of a paper of Wittens which was taken as explaining why it would never work in QG. So it was a holy grail sitting around in plain view that almost everybody tried to pretend wasn't there.
since Witten condemned the Kodama, it has taken the audacity of a brass monkey even to contemplate it, and not many researchers have.
So there is some historical background that I should gather here, and some links to previous Kodama research. Smolin co-authored with several people----Laurent Freidel, Stephon Alexander. there were a couple of people at Uni British Columbia. And now handy Andy the grad student at University of Texas.
these people form, for me, a small honor roll. brave souls all
and I could be completely wrong---it looks to me like Andy, unlikely as that seems (since he doesn't even have his PhD yet) has cured the Kodama of its earlier lameness by generalizing it (using a real Immirzi number). And if I am wrong then I look stupid and fall flat on my face.
but either way we should have some background detail about the Kodama state in QG, which please contribute to if you wish and I will try to assemble here in this thread.
I guess I better give links to the two new Kodama papers by Randono, in case anyone hasnt got them already
https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=143886
http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0611073
http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0611074
As in----if only the Kodama state was normalizable, if only we had the Kodama state then we would have a nice classical limit and all our problems would go away or at least be much much easier!
You might want to call it the Holy Grail of background independent QG, but the thing about the Holy Grail was that a whole lot of people went optimistically out to look for it. But in 2003 people were kind of scared off the Kodama because of a paper of Wittens which was taken as explaining why it would never work in QG. So it was a holy grail sitting around in plain view that almost everybody tried to pretend wasn't there.
since Witten condemned the Kodama, it has taken the audacity of a brass monkey even to contemplate it, and not many researchers have.
So there is some historical background that I should gather here, and some links to previous Kodama research. Smolin co-authored with several people----Laurent Freidel, Stephon Alexander. there were a couple of people at Uni British Columbia. And now handy Andy the grad student at University of Texas.
these people form, for me, a small honor roll. brave souls all
and I could be completely wrong---it looks to me like Andy, unlikely as that seems (since he doesn't even have his PhD yet) has cured the Kodama of its earlier lameness by generalizing it (using a real Immirzi number). And if I am wrong then I look stupid and fall flat on my face.
but either way we should have some background detail about the Kodama state in QG, which please contribute to if you wish and I will try to assemble here in this thread.
I guess I better give links to the two new Kodama papers by Randono, in case anyone hasnt got them already
https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=143886
http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0611073
http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0611074
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