Quantum Gravity Explorations

This is a collaborative study group dedicated to understanding the foundations, motivations, and current landscape of quantum gravity research. Our goal is breadth over depth: rather than mastering every technical detail, we aim to build a clear conceptual picture of why quantum gravity is challenging, what the major approaches attempt to do, and how they compare.

Nevertheless, developing a coherent understanding of quantum gravity does require engaging with the mathematics. We will work through explicit equations and derivations to understand how gravitational dynamics emerge, how quantum consistency constrains theories, and why certain results are unavoidable rather than assumed.

Participants should have a basic familiarity with the principles of quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, and general relativity, and be comfortable with the Lagrangian formalism of physical theories.

What to expect

• We assign readings, lectures to watch, and curated exercises prior to each meeting, which will be announced below.
• During the meetings, one or more of the volunteers will walk through the assigned materials and moderate the discussion.
• Additional discussion between meetings will take place on our chat server, where we can exchange solutions, notes, interesting and relevant articles, etc. Notes and solutions may also be hosted in our Github repository.

What this group is NOT

• Not a popular science or sci-fi discussion group.
• Not a high-pressure, exercise-heavy boot camp.
• Not a forum to strongly endorse or air grievances against any one approach to quantum gravity.

For casual physics chat or general discussion, please see our other Meetup groups.

Community & Continuity
We maintain a live chat server for continuing discussions between meetups, and a link can be provided upon request if you’d like to join. This even is part of the broader Physics With Friends community, which hosts multiple collaborative study tracks across physics and mathematics.

Materials & Assignments
For the next several meetings, we will be going through Barton Zwiebach’s A First Course in String Theory, 2nd Ed. (Amazon link).

This is our very first meeting, which will give a gentle introduction to string theory. To prepare for the discussion, please read/watch the following:

• Chapter 1 of Zwiebach
• "Introduction" from David Tong's string theory lecture notes (https://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/tong/string.html)
• "The historical origins of string theory" (video 1) from Leonard Susskind’s string theory lectures (https://theoreticalminimum.com/courses/string-theory/2010/fall)