The Quantum Gravity Concept Map is a highly experimental work: its goals are to help the author organize his own understanding of the subject, and to test the hypothesis that html is a natural language for the construction of a concept map.
As a personal tool to further understand a difficult research area, it reflects the author's attitudes and priorities. First and foremost is the emphasis on what we can learn from the many experiments that shed light on both Quantum Field Theory and General Relativity. We also believe that the mathematical structure of the theories themselves may yet have much to teach us, and the elements they share should be viewed as a signpost to further research.
Physics is the application of mathematics to the understanding of the universe we inhabit. That the language of mathematics is necessary for the expression of that understanding is a corollary of the notion of objective reality: physics may only concern itself with those phenomena which are independent of the physicist. That is, if two physicists can independently perform the same experiment and the mathematical expressions of their results are equivalent, then what they have studied is real. Anything else is in their minds.
But while the mathematics behind both General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory is rich and complex, it is the purpose of this work to organize the concepts which are described by the mathematics: those ideas which both experiment and mathematics validate, but whose expression does not use mathematics. This is a very volatile area. Almost invariably, as soon as one attempts to abstract the fundamental ideas from (an already very abstract!) mathematical description of nature, one applies one's own models and interpretations. We will attempt in this work to avoid that at all costs in order to sidestep the so-called "paradoxical difficulties" which have plagued our understanding of Quantum Mechanics.
This work does not currently include such topics as supersymmetry, supergravity, technicolor, grand unification, Kaluza-Klein compactification, strings, p-branes, etc. This exclusion is in no way meant to discount the often fascinating results in those areas. It is simply intended as a way to limit the scope of this project to those concepts which are (at least nearly) universally accepted as (more or less) correct due to their (direct or indirect) experimental underpinnings.
If you have any comments or suggestions about this work, please e-mail the author.
You may enter the map at any of these major concepts:
The concept map has been implemented using hypertext links, so that the relationships between concepts are explicit in their cross-linking (as in the introduction above). Terms or phrases which are underlined but are not themselves links identify the point of definition or explanation of the term or phrase. The author is also interested in any comments you may have about the effectiveness of the hypertext concept map in the organization of the information within.
©1997, Kenneth R. Koehler. All Rights Reserved.