Feynman's Cal Tech Lectures on Gravity

On Aug 5, 2011, at 2:30 PM, Paul Zielinski wrote:

I think for one that this was Feynman's general view of the real physical meaning of Einstein's 1916 theory of gravity.


Feynman in his lectures on gravitation builds Einstein's GR from his diagrams starting with a non-dynamical globally flat background like what I just used in the tetrad Fourier transforms ---> convolutions for products in the universal minimal coupling of gravity to all matter fields.

As I recall Feynman found the same kind of non-analytic phase transition as one sees in BCS theory of superconductivity.

That is, in order to get the complete classical theory

Guv + kTuv = 0

he had to sum an infinite series of I think tree diagrams - those with loops being quantum gravity corrections - as I recall.

In effect this may be a model for the inflation vacuum phase transition when gravity comes into being as a collective mode in a kind of bootstrap. The false vacuum having no tensor gravity at all just zero rest mass leptons, quarks and internal symmetry gauge bosons.