Jürgen Tolksdorf - Böcker

This book focuses on a critical discussion of the status and prospects of current approaches in quantum mechanics and quantum field theory, in particular concerning gravity.

This book focuses on a critical discussion of the status and prospects of current approaches in quantum mechanics and quantum field theory, in particular concerning gravity.

One of the most challenging problems of contemporary theoretical physics is the mathematically rigorous construction of a theory which describes gravitation and the other fundamental physical interactions within a common framework. The physical ideas which grew from attempts to develop such a theory require highly advanced mathematical methods and radically new physical concepts. This book presents different approaches to a rigorous unified description of quantum fields and gravity. It contains a carefully selected cross-section of lively discussions which took place in autumn 2010 at the fifth conference "Quantum field theory and gravity - Conceptual and mathematical advances in the search for a unified framework" in Regensburg, Germany. In the tradition of the other proceedings covering this series of conferences, a special feature of this book is the exposition of a wide variety of approaches, with the intention to facilitate a comparison. The book is mainly addressed to mathematicians and physicists who are interested in fundamental questions of mathematical physics. It allows the reader to obtain a broad and up-to-date overview of a fascinating active research area.

One of the most challenging problems of contemporary theoretical physics is the mathematically rigorous construction of a theory which describes gravitation and the other fundamental physical interactions within a common framework.

Quantum physics has been highly successful for more than 90 years. Nevertheless, a rigorous construction of interacting quantum field theory is still missing. Moreover, it is still unclear how to combine quantum physics and general relativity in a unified physical theory. Attacking these challenging problems of contemporary physics requires highly advanced mathematical methods as well as radically new physical concepts.This book presents different physical ideas and mathematical approaches in this direction. It contains a carefully selected cross-section of lectures which took place in autumn 2014 at the sixth conference ``Quantum Mathematical Physics - A Bridge between Mathematics and Physics'' in Regensburg, Germany. In the tradition of the other proceedings covering this series of conferences, a special feature of this book is the exposition of a wide variety of approaches, with the intention to facilitate a comparison.The book is mainly addressed to mathematicians and physicists who are interested in fundamental questions of mathematical physics. It allows the reader to obtain a broad and up-to-date overview of a fascinating active research area.

Attacking these challenging problems of contemporary physics requires highly advanced mathematical methods as well as radically new physical concepts. This book presents different physical ideas and mathematical approaches in this direction.

This Edited Volume is based on a workshop on “Mathematical and Physical - pects of Quantum Gravity” held at the Heinrich-Fabri Institute in Blaubeuren st (Germany) from July 28th to August 1 , 2005. This workshop was the succ- sor of a similar workshop held at the same place in September 2003 on the issue of “Mathematical and Physical Aspects of Quantum Field Theories”. Both wo- shops were intended to bring together mathematicians and physicists to discuss profoundquestionswithin the non-emptyintersectionofmathematics andphysics. The basic idea of this series of workshops is to cover a broad range of di?erent approaches (both mathematical and physical) to a speci?c subject in mathema- cal physics. The series of workshops is intended, in particular, to discuss the basic conceptual ideas behind di?erent mathematical and physical approaches to the subject matter concerned. The workshop on which this volume is based was devoted to what is c- monly regarded as the biggest challenge in mathematical physics: the “quanti- tion of gravity”. The gravitational interaction is known to be very di?erent from the known interactions like, for instance, the electroweak or strong interaction of elementary particles. First of all, to our knowledge, any kind of energy has a gravitational coupling. Second, since Einstein it is widely accepted that gravity is intimately related to the structure of space-time. Both facts have far reaching consequences for any attempt to develop a quantum theory of gravity.