Friday, May 30, 2014

general relativity - How can gravitions exist without violating GR?



How can gravitions exist without violating GR, since GR says that gravity is curvature in space-time.



Answer



For energies below the scale where gravity becomes strongly coupled, the paradigm of QFT is applicable and teaches us that gravity is due to the exchange of massless spin-2 particles we call gravitons, and that the whole picture of curved space time is nothing but a nice way to equivalently represent the collective effect of a huge number of gravitons (classical limit of a quantum system), so that it "seems" as if space time is curved for large objects. Of course this whole picture can be wrong, an there might never be gravitons, but it is in this pictures that the notion of a graviton has meaning.


No comments:

Post a Comment

classical mechanics - Moment of a force about a given axis (Torque) - Scalar or vectorial?

I am studying Statics and saw that: The moment of a force about a given axis (or Torque) is defined by the equation: $M_X = (\vec r \times \...