Gravity Field Theory in Flat Space Time: Best References

[andresB]

Besides the Feynman lectures on gravitation, I'm looking for modern and complete treatments of the topic of classical gravitation as a field theory in flat space time. Any suggestion?

 

[PeterDonis]

Moderator's note: modified thread title a bit to make it more descriptive.

 

[atyy]

https://books.google.com.sg/books?id=HDmucsxABzYC&source=gbs_navlinks_s
Gravity and Strings (see Chapter 3)
Tomás Ortín

https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.00319
EPFL Lectures on General Relativity as a Quantum Field Theory
John F. Donoghue, Mikhail M. Ivanov, Andrey Shkerin

 

[haushofer]

I really like

https://arxiv.org/abs/1105.3735

Focussing on massive gravity, it contains a great review of Fierz-Pauli.

 

[pervect]

https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0006423 might be interesting too. Straumann's "Reflections on Gravity".

Note that the "flat" metric turns out not to be physically observable. How - and even if - the whole approach deals with black holes isn't particularly clear to me.

A pedagogical description of a simple ungeometrical approach to General Relativity is given, which follows the pattern of well understood field theories, such as electrodynamics. This leads quickly to most of the important weak field predictions, as well as to the radiation damping of binary pulsars. Moreover, certain consistency arguments imply that the theory has to be generally invariant, and therefore one is bound to end up with Einstein's field equations. Although this field theoretic approach, which has been advocated repeatedly by a number of authors, starts with a spin-2 theory on Minkowski spacetime, it turns out in the end that the flat metric is actually unobservable, and that the physical metric is curved and dynamical.
Short sections are devoted to tensor-scalar generalizations, the mystery of the vacuum energy density, and quintessence.