A great 16 page paper in quantum cosmology

[marcus]

http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/hep-th/9910146

This is only 16 pages and in PDF so easy to print out.
It is by Fotini Markopoulou and Lee Smolin and it is called
"Holography in a quantum spacetime"

I nominate it for the landmark eureka paper of 1999.

String theory and branes are on the run, loop quantum gravity is in. This paper is comparatively simple because it is at the beginning of something new.

The other shoe to this paper is Lee Smolin's quantum gravity 2003 survey paper----which however is 90 pages, so not as easy to print out. Baez was just praising this Smolin survey in his "recent finds" It is a wonderful comprehensive survey but it is in a way *based* on this short much simpler 1999 paper with Markopoulou.

All the Hilbert spaces are finite dimensional!

There are no extra "rolled-up" spacetime dimensions (unless somebody wants to have them-----they arent necessary)

Here is the URL for Smolin's 2003 survey

http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/hep-th/0303185

which is called "How far are we from the quantum theory of gravity?"

Found what I've read in the 90 page paper reasonably persuasive but really got religion when I read the 16 page paper. believe it deserves to be considered a breakthrough of some kind.
check it out and get in at the ground floor of a new development

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

What have you found on this topic?