Abstract
The first “work on quantum gravity was published by Rosenfeld in 1930.1 At that time quantum electrodynamics had been given a precise mathematical formulation and it was already known that the theory was beset with divergences. 1930 was in the era when the gravitational and electromagnetic fields were still regarded as the fundamental fields of nature. Rosenfeld calculated the gravitational self-energy of a photon and found that it was quadratically divergent. Nowadays, using a manifestly covariant calculational formalism we would not speak of the photon as acquiring a self-energy, but say rather that the photon field itself has become renormalized and hence so has the charge on an electron.
Work supported in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation.
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© 1979 Plenum Press, New York
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DeWitt, B. (1979). Quantum Gravity. In: Perlmutter, A., Scott, L.F. (eds) On the Path of Albert Einstein. Studies in the Natural Sciences. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-3596-2_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-3596-2_6
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