How Not to Establish the Non-renormalizability of Gravity

Foundations of Physics 48 (2):237-252 (2018)
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Abstract

General relativity cannot be formulated as a perturbatively renormalizable quantum field theory. An argument relying on the validity of the Bekenstein–Hawking entropy formula aims at dismissing gravity as non-renormalizable per se, against hopes that d-dimensional GR could turn out to have a non-perturbatively renormalizable d–dimensional quantum field theoretic formulation. In this note we discuss various forms of highly problematic semi-classical extrapolations assumed by both sides of the debate concerning what we call The Entropy Argument, and show that a large class of dimensional reduction scenarios leads to the blow-up of Bekenstein–Hawking entropy.

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Renormalization for philosophers.Jeremy Butterfield & Nazim Bouatta - 2015 - In Tomasz Bigaj & Christian Wüthrich (eds.), Metaphysics in Contemporary Physics. Boston: Brill | Rodopi. pp. 437–485.

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