English

Schwinger's Approach to Einstein's Gravity and Beyond

History and Philosophy of Physics 2015-06-18 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

Julian Schwinger (1918--1994), founder of renormalized quantum electrodynamics, was arguably the leading theoretical physicist of the second half of the 20th century. Thus it is not surprising that he made contributions to gravity theory as well. His students made major impacts on the still uncompleted program of constructing a quantum theory of gravity. Schwinger himself had no doubt of the validity of general relativity, although he preferred a particle-physics viewpoint based on gravitons and the associated fields, and not the geometrical picture of curved spacetime. This note provides a brief summary of his contributions and attitudes toward the subject of gravity.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1312.4298,
  title  = {Schwinger's Approach to Einstein's Gravity and Beyond},
  author = {K. A. Milton},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1312.4298},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

6 pages, no figures; revised version has changed title, clarifications, and additional references

R2 v1 2026-06-22T02:28:15.697Z