English

How not to establish the non-renormalizability of gravity

History and Philosophy of Physics 2018-02-14 v1 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

General relativity cannot be formulated as a perturbatively renormalizable quantum field theory. An argument relying on the validity of the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy formula aims at dismissing gravity as non-renormalizable per se, against hopes (underlying programs such as Asymptotic Safety) that d-dimensional GR could turn out to have a non-perturbatively renormalizable d-dimensional quantum field theoretic formulation. In this note we discuss various forms of highly problematic semi-classical extrapolations assumed by both sides of the debate concerning what we call The Entropy Argument, and show that a large class of dimensional reduction scenarios leads to the blow-up of Bekenstein-Hawking entropy.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1712.09959,
  title  = {How not to establish the non-renormalizability of gravity},
  author = {Juliusz Doboszewski and Niels Siegbert Linnemann},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1712.09959},
  year   = {2018}
}

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17 pages