We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected]
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
The holy grail of theoretical physics is to find the theory of everything that combines all the forces of nature, including gravity. This book addresses the question: how far are we from such discovery? Over the last few decades, multiple roads to finding a quantum theory of gravity have been proposed but no obvious description of nature has emerged in this domain. What is to be made of this situation? This volume probes the state-of-the art in this daunting quest of theoretical physics by collecting critical interviews with nearly forty leading theorists in this field. These broad-ranging conversations give important insights and candid opinions on the various approaches to quantum gravity, including string theory, loop quantum gravity, causal set theory and asymptotic safety. This unique, readable overview provides a gateway into cutting edge research for students and others who wish to engage with the open problem of quantum gravity.
Loop quantum gravity has formalized a robust scheme in resolving classical singularities in a variety of symmetry-reduced models of gravity. In this essay, we demonstrate that the same quantum correction that is crucial for singularity resolution is also responsible for the phenomenon of signature change in these models, whereby one effectively transitions from a `fuzzy' Euclidean space to a Lorentzian space-time in deep quantum regimes. As long as one uses a quantization scheme that respects covariance, holonomy corrections from loop quantum gravity generically leads to nonsingular signature change, thereby giving an emergent notion of time in the theory. Robustness of this mechanism is established by comparison across a large class of midisuperspace models and allowing for diverse quantization ambiguities. Conceptual and mathematical consequences of such an underlying quantum-deformed spacetime are briefly discussed.