The Quest for Quantum Gravity, The Necessity and Viewpoints

Speaker : Shahin Sheikh-Jabbari, IPM, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

According to our current understanding, dynamics of physical systems can be formulated once we know the interactions between basic ingredients of these systems. It has appeared that field theory, and in particular perturbative Quantum Field Theory (QFT), provides the right setup to formulate the question of interactions. Gravity is one of those interactions which is seemingly described by Einstein theory of General Relativity (GR). Einstein GR is a classical field theory with metric of spacetime as its dynamical degree of freedom. Standard process of quantization of field theories applied to Einstein GR, faces problems. In this talk we first discuss why in the first place we expect the gravity should be quantized, what is expected from a theory of quantum gravity and various approaches proposed and discussed in the literature to the problem of Quantum Gravity.