Mathematicians Prove 2D Version of Quantum Gravity Really Works
Mathematicians Prove 2D Version of Quantum Gravity Really Works SERIES MATH MEETS QFT Mathematicians Prove 2D Version of Quantum Gravity Really Works By CHARLIE WOOD June 17, 2021 In three towering papers, a team of mathematicians has worked out the details of Liouville quantum field theory, a two-dimensional model of quantum gravity. 18 READ LATER Olena Shmahalo/Quanta Magazine Alexander Polyakov , a theoretical physicist now at Princeton University, caught a glimpse of the future of quantum theory in 1981. A range of mysteries, from the wiggling of strings to the binding of quarks into protons, demanded a new mathematical tool whose silhouette he could just make out. “There are methods and formulae in science which serve as master keys to many apparently different problems,” he wrote in the introduction to a now famous four-page letter in Physics Letters B . “At the present time we have to develop an art of handling sums over random surfaces.” Polyakov’s ...