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Alexander Peach · June 23, 2020

Theoretical Physics · PhD Theoretical Physics (2017), Durham University, UK.

Why don’t quantum mechanics and general relativity go well together?

What are the problems that occur when merging the two theories?
There’s nothing problematic about considering quantum matter in a fixed
gravitational field, that’s what quantum field theories in curved spacetimes do.
What is presently extremely difficult however, is trying to describe the quantum
gravitational field.

To date there have been many different attempts to do this. So far, no single
attempt has had much more “success” than any other, though there are certain
approaches that are more popular than others.

One might summarise the difficulties of trying to describe the quantum

gravitational field (hereafter “QG”) by saying that we simply haven’t yet found the
right way to approach the problem; or rather, all of the most obvious, well-
motivated approaches seem to run into insurmountable problems very quickly.

Back in the 1960s, we found that quantum field theories (QFT), developed by
Dyson, Dirac, Feynman and others, gave spectacularly accurate descriptions of
nature. Very succinctly, if you put a quantum field on a fixed “flat” background, and
consider small wiggles of the fields around that background, you arrive at
something called “perturbative quantum field theory”, which seems to work very
well. One issue is that you can only work within this framework if none of the
wiggles get uncontrollably large, in theory; if that happens, you need to add more
(potentially infinitely many more) parameters to the theory, meaning that it has
less power to make predictions, without you having to fix all of these parameters to
match every single prediction artificially (not good!) This is the issue of so-called
non-renormalisation in quantum field theories.

Back to gravity. In the 1910s Einstein gave us the General Theory of Relativity (GR),
our most up-to-date and extremely well-tested theory of gravity. In that
framework, the gravitational field is the shape of spacetime, and what we think of
as freely falling objects are really those following the “paths of least resistance”
through spacetime, on idealised curves called geodesics. One astonishing feature
of GR is that, in contrast to more familiar theories where you consider things
happening on a fixed background, the equations of GR actually determine the
background itself! In particular, to work with the theory, we don’t put in the
background that objects in the theory live on, but the background is determined by
the objects in question. This is known as background independence, which is in
stark contrast to, say, quantum field theories, which are background dependent.

The most naive, most obvious thing to do in order to describe QG is to take GR and
try to make it into a QFT. However, background independence presents us with a
problem, because in QFT we’re used to considering that the fields live on a fixed
background. We can get past this by reducing GR to the dynamics of the
gravitational field on a particular fixed background, and re-casting the dynamics
from the perspective of changes to the shape of that fixed background. Specifically,
we take the gravitational field to be the sum of a fixed part, plus a wiggle that
describes the potential changes to its shape as the system evolves. This doesn’t
square with background independence, indeed it might seem almost contradictory,
but from a pragmatic perspective there’s nothing wrong with doing this.

The trouble is, we very quickly run into the issue of the “wiggles” (now of the
gravitational field itself) growing uncontrollably large. This theory of QG turns out
to be non-renormalisable; you can’t actually fix it without needing an infinite
number of parameters. So the theory is fundamentally broken. No dice.

But… there is a small caveat that lets us at least get away with something that
might be useful. In general, we expect a fundamental theory to be true regardless
of the physical regime it corresponds to, for large things, very tiny things, very
massive or very light things. However, if we relax this requirement, that this theory
of QG should be applicable in all plausible energy/length-scales, we can still get
away with a so-called effective theory. An effective theory is a theory that works
well only within a certain window. At very low-temperatures for example, you can
get away with treating water as a solid. But once you consider what happens above
its melting point, the solid description no longer describes what’s going on! So, this
theory of QG can describe what happens in nature but only for very, very tiny
changes to the gravitational field. In that case, the theory predicts the existence of
gravitons: massless “spin-2” fluctuations that describe the wiggles of the quantum
gravitational field around a fixed background. However, since this is only an
effective theory, gravitons are almost certainly not really fundamental.

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So what about the full theory? Well, let’s try to go back to basics and try a different
approach:

Suppose we consider two massive particles, made of billions of atoms, located at

fixed points in space. According to Newton, both exert a force on each other that
depends on the square of the distance between them.

Now in GR, these forces correspond to the fact that the shape of spacetime in
which these two particles exist, is warped in their vicinity, in such a way that they
naturally accelerate towards each other. Suppose we now take one of the masses
and strip off its atoms one at a time until we have just one, or a handful of atoms
left. At some point this mass is now a quantum object. Now quantum mechanics
now tells us that this particle doesn’t have a precise location, or due to
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, the more precisely you know where it is
located, the less precisely you know what its momentum is. Now suppose I want to
consider the force being exerted on the large mass by the tiny, quantum particle. In
GR terms, this should follow from the geometry of spacetime induced by the
quantum particle, but if the quantum particle doesn’t have a definite location, then
what is the shape of spacetime? If the particle is really in a superposition of
different locations, if the shape of spacetime in a superposition of different
shapes? Classical GR isn’t going to work anymore, that’s for sure, we need QG to
know what’s happening in this case.

There is also the so-called “problem of time”, but this isn’t really a problem.
Basically, in quantum mechanics we’re used to working with states that evolve in
time, but since GR doesn’t have any absolute notion of time, then these two
frameworks seem to be at odds. However, there is a way to formulate quantum
mechanics in a so-called generally-covariant fashion; this is what happens in loop
quantum gravity for example (see either of the two major textbooks by Rovelli for
example)
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