Abhay Ashtekar
Posted by g.e. on September 30, 2006
Was reading this article on The Economist and was delighted to see that one of the two ideas being advanced for the “general theory of everything” has a Indian brain behind it. See some bits on Loop Quantum Gravity and the man, Abhay Ashtekar, behind it.
No clue whats all this, to reproduce from The Economist:
Loop quantum gravity, as this rival is known, was dreamed up in 1986 by Abhay Ashtekar, of Pennsylvania State University. He rewrote the equations of general relativity to make them compatible with quantum mechanics. It really took off as an alternative to string theory, though, when it was picked up by Lee Smolin, now of the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, and Carlo Rovelli, of the Université de la Méditerranée in France. Together, they developed Dr Ashtekar’s idea to show that it implies that space and time are not smooth, as general relativity requires, but come in tiny, distinct chunks.
