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Foil 4 The Spirit of General Relativity as a Description of Gravitational Forces as the Structure of Space-Time

From Numerical Formulation and Solution of Collision 0f two Black Holes CPSP713 Case studies in Computational Science -- Spring Semester 1996. by Geoffrey C. Fox


We are familiar with Newton's Laws for the Interactions between Particles:
"What" Causes this force?
  • At the most fundamental level of Quantum gravity, we will we find "elementary" Gauge Particles -- The Gravitons which are analogue of Photons for Electromagnetism and Gluons for Quantum Chromodynamics
  • Most Physicists believe all forces can be described by a unified theory at the Quantum level but this is still speculative.
  • The Graviton is unusual as has Spin 2 (Corresponding to two indices in metric tensor gmn we will soon study) wheras other force quanta are spin 1
    • For instance, spin 1 Photon corresponds to single index vector field Am
  • However we will study the classical theory which is sufficient for all observations



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