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June 19, 2015

Asymptotic Safety and the Gribov Ambiguity

Recently, an old post of mine about the Asymptotic Safety program for quantizing gravity received a flurry of new comments. Inadvertently, one of the pseudonymous commenters pointed out yet another problem with the program, which deserves a post all its own.

Before launching in, I should say that

  1. Everything I am about to say was known to Iz Singer in 1978. Though, as with the corresponding result for nonabelian gauge theory, the import seems to be largely unappreciated by physicists working on the subject.
  2. I would like to thank Valentin Zakharevich, a very bright young grad student in our Math Department for a discussion on this subject, which clarified things greatly for me.
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Posted by distler at 3:11 AM | Permalink | Followups (9)