General Theory of Relativityby Anonymous
Reader Rating:
See Detailed Ratings
April 28, 2004: Most reviews fail to mention-perhaps because it's so well known to the practitioners -that Dirac was one of the original contributors to general relativity! I'd very much like to point out that Dirac in 1950 published his Hamiltonian Constraint Theory for non-linear systems and showed in 1958,1959,1968 to his fellow workers in general relativity how the problem of quantization - deducing that gravitons have spin two and the physical(theoretical)reasons for the existence of gravitational radiation may be looked at from the point of view of Hamiltonian formalism. An approach which many including Abdus Salam and Bryce deWitt regarded as bringing to a kind of technical completion this rather intricate and vexing problem. After his work people can start making investigations more into the real physics of the problem. Although Dirac did not specifically address the hamiltonian approach he spent some pages on the oustanding problems of localisation of energy and the pseudo tesor form of 'energy momentum' problem in gr and a very fascinating treatment of gravitational radiation and graviton spin.