Loop Quantum Gravity For The Bewildered
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Loop Quantum Gravity for the Bewildered
Author: Sundance Bilson-Thompson
language: en
Publisher: Springer Nature
Release Date: 2024-02-27
This second edition offers a comprehensive introduction to loop quantum gravity (LQG) in self-dual variables, including the necessary prerequisites. Additionally, it delves into various significant research areas that have emerged in recent years. New content (including an entirely new chapter dedicated to dynamics of quantum spacetime) explores the description of spin networks and spin-foams, their historical development as well as connections to tensor networks, BF theory, and emerging approaches including the spinorial representation of LQG, SU(2) coherent states, and group field theory. Furthermore, the book provides expanded appendices covering essential tools and concepts, such as the connection between information theory and entropy, and overviews of group theory and differential geometry. All topics are presented from a non-expert perspective, ensuring self-containment and accessibility. The primary aim of this second edition remains helping researchers, bewildered bythe vast array of topics within this rapidly growing field of quantum gravity, to gain a fundamental understanding of the current developments.
LQG for the Bewildered
This primer offers a concise introduction to Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG) - a theoretical framework for uniting Quantum Mechanics (QM) with General Relativity (GR). The emphasis is on the physical aspects of the framework and its historical development in terms of self-dual variables, still most suited for a first, pedagogical encounter with LQG. The text starts by reviewing GR and the very basics of Quantum Field Theory (QFT), and then explains in a concise and clear manner the steps leading from the Einstein-Hilbert action for gravity to the construction of the quantum states of geometry, known as spin-networks, and which provide the basis for the kinematical Hilbert space of quantum general relativity. Along the way the various associated concepts of tetrads, spin-connection and holonomies are introduced. Having thus provided a minimal introduction to the LQG framework, some applications to the problems of black hole entropy and of quantum cosmology are briefly surveyed. Last but not least, a list of the most common criticisms of LQG is presented, which are then tackled one by one in order to convince the reader of the physical viability of the theory. A set of appendices provides accessible introductions to several key notions such as the Peter-Weyl theorem, duality of differential forms and Regge calculus, among others. The presentation is aimed at graduate students and researchers who have some familiarity with the tools of QM and GR, but are intimidated by the technicalities required to browse through the existing LQG literature. This primer aims at making the formalism appear a little less bewildering to the uninitiated and helps lower the barrier for entry into the field.
African Fans of European Football
Author: Manase Kudzai Chiweshe
language: en
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Release Date: 2025-03-26
This book examines the increasing influence of European football in African societies, considering the processes and significance of being a fan and what this means for the wider globalisation of popular culture. Focussing on fan cultures in Kenya and Zimbabwe, the book argues that instead of manifestations of neo-colonialism, African fandoms of European football are practised in ways that resonate with and help reconstruct and perform the socio-cultural substance of the African communities in question. European football is therefore instrumentalised to help define the identities of the members of the fandom communities and articulate their experience of their reality in their immediate circumstances. This book reflects how the global and local can coalesce in cultural trends such as football fandom. It will interest sports, leisure, popular culture, and social anthropology researchers in Africa and beyond.