- #71
tom.stoer
Science Advisor
- 5,779
- 172
One has to make very clear what is meant by gravitons:
- physical particles that can be detected experimentally?
- certain states in a Hilbert space?
- idealized plane wave states in a Feynman diagram used to do pertutbation theory?
- ...
One must not mix the plane-wave concept with something like physical existence. The plane waves are a mathematical tool that does not directly fit to experiments. In experiments you detect localized particles, whereas planes waves are certainly not localized. So the problem you observe in QG is implicitly there in ordinary QFT as well, but you are used to hide it behind hand waving arguments going back to the Kopenhagen interpretation.
I don't think that renormalization group theory depends on the existence of plane wave solutions! Neither do Feynman diagrams; they can e.g. be formulated with distorted waves, even if this is less well-known and more complicated.
Look at QCD: you can formulate QCD (at least in a certain regime - e.g. deep inelastic scattering) based on gluons, but that concepts FAILES completely when it comes to hadron physics.
So I don't see why we should insist on a theory that relies on a perturbative concept only. If string theory can be completed non-perturbatively then I expect that something different from plane wave state must emerge.
- physical particles that can be detected experimentally?
- certain states in a Hilbert space?
- idealized plane wave states in a Feynman diagram used to do pertutbation theory?
- ...
One must not mix the plane-wave concept with something like physical existence. The plane waves are a mathematical tool that does not directly fit to experiments. In experiments you detect localized particles, whereas planes waves are certainly not localized. So the problem you observe in QG is implicitly there in ordinary QFT as well, but you are used to hide it behind hand waving arguments going back to the Kopenhagen interpretation.
I don't think that renormalization group theory depends on the existence of plane wave solutions! Neither do Feynman diagrams; they can e.g. be formulated with distorted waves, even if this is less well-known and more complicated.
Look at QCD: you can formulate QCD (at least in a certain regime - e.g. deep inelastic scattering) based on gluons, but that concepts FAILES completely when it comes to hadron physics.
So I don't see why we should insist on a theory that relies on a perturbative concept only. If string theory can be completed non-perturbatively then I expect that something different from plane wave state must emerge.