Cecile Dewitt-morette

1946 is the year Bryce DeWitt entered Harvard graduate school. Quantum Gravity was his goal and remained his goal throughout his lifetime until the very end. The pursuit of Quantum Gravity requires a profound understanding of Quantum Physics and Gravitation Physics. As G. A. Vilkovisky commented , "Quantum Gravity is a combination of two words, and one should know both. Bryce understood this as nobody else, and this wisdom is completely unknown to many authors of the flux of papers that we see nowadays." Distingished physicist Cecile DeWitt-Morette skillfully blends her personal and scientific account with a wealth of her late husband's often unpublished writings on the subject matter. This volume, through the perspective of the leading researcher on quantum gravity of his generation, will provide an invaluable source of reference for anyone working in the field.

1946 is the year Bryce DeWitt entered Harvard graduate school. Quantum Gravity was his goal and remained his goal throughout his lifetime until the very end. The pursuit of Quantum Gravity requires a profound understanding of Quantum Physics and Gravitation Physics. As G. A. Vilkovisky commented , "Quantum Gravity is a combination of two words, and one should know both. Bryce understood this as nobody else, and this wisdom is completely unknown to many authors of the flux of papers that we see nowadays." Distingished physicist Cecile DeWitt-Morette skillfully blends her personal and scientific account with a wealth of her late husband's often unpublished writings on the subject matter. This volume, through the perspective of the leading researcher on quantum gravity of his generation, will provide an invaluable source of reference for anyone working in the field.

Functional integration successfully entered physics as path integrals in the 1942 PhD dissertation of Richard P. Feynman, but it made no sense at all as a mathematical definition. Cartier and DeWitt-Morette have created, in this book, a fresh approach to functional integration. The book is self-contained: mathematical ideas are introduced, developed, generalised and applied. In the authors' hands, functional integration is shown to be a robust, user-friendly and multi-purpose tool that can be applied to a great variety of situations, for example: systems of indistinguishable particles; Aharonov–Bohm systems; supersymmetry; non-gaussian integrals. Problems in quantum field theory are also considered. In the final part the authors outline topics that can be profitably pursued using material already presented.

On April 20, 1951, Léon Van Hove presented his thesis “Sur certaines représentations unitaires d'un groupe infini de transformations' to the Université libre de Bruxelles (Free University of Brussels), two days before the University of Grenoble had approved the creation of L'Ecole d'été de physique théorique at Les Houches (Haute Savoie, France). The first session of the “Ecole des Houches” began on July 15, 1951, with a month-long course by Van Hove on quantum mechanics. The lecture notes for this course were written for the benefit of physicists who — like most of their colleagues outside the US, Canada, and England at that time — did not know quantum mechanics but wanted to learn it seriously. Van Hove's course met their expectations fully. The physics course benefitted from the mathematical expertise of the lecturer, which is also apparent in this thesis. Without his own research as scaffolding, Van Hove could not have built the short and beautiful course which provided the participants with a solid, useful foundation in modern physics. The lecture notes are in French. If they had been in English they would have been published together with the translation of the thesis. The first three pages of the notes are reproduced at the end of this book. The set of notes was reproduced by stencils and distributed to the participants at the beginning of the course. The translation of Léon Van Hove's thesis was initiated in late 2000, when Bob Hermann, formerly in the Department of Mathematics at MIT, sent to Van Hove's son Michel his view on the thesis: “I would consider it as one of the most important mathematical physics papers of the past fifty years, containing the key ideas for what has become known as ‘geometric quantization.’” Indeed, the thesis is interesting both to historians of science and to theoretical physicists and mathematicians exploring the relationships between quantum and classical physics, based on the Hilbert-space approach to classical mechanics.

This reference book, which has found wide use as a text, provides an answer to the needs of graduate physical mathematics students and their teachers. The present edition is a thorough revision of the first, including a new chapter entitled ``Connections on Principle Fibre Bundles'' which includes sections on holonomy, characteristic classes, invariant curvature integrals and problems on the geometry of gauge fields, monopoles, instantons, spin structure and spin connections. Many paragraphs have been rewritten, and examples and exercises added to ease the study of several chapters. The index includes over 130 entries.