Geometrodynamics of gauge fields. On the geometry of Yang-Mills and gravitational gauge theories (Q261511)

This is an introductory-comprehensive book on past and recent (mainly till the 1990's) advances on the ``geometrodynamics'' program of describing physical matter completely in terms of pure geometry. Tradionally, the physical concept of ``energy'' had rather been associated with continuous fields while that of ``mass'' rather with corpuscular matter: the two aspects of physical reality was considered being sharply different till the end of the 19th century. However since Einstein's famous \(E=mc^2\) formula, energy and mass have became conceptually indistinguishable and the question has then been raised (again): which of them is more fundamental? The empirical success, aestetical beauty and conceptual simplicity of the two purely geometric physical theories: general relativity and Yang-Mills theories -- together with Einstein's influensive personal commitment toward geometry and his criticism of the Koppenhagean quantum mechanics -- have motivated the efforts to understand matter as a sort of ``concentrated form of pure energy'' i.e., to identify particles, so far described by singular objects moving on the continuous space-time background, with regular pure geometric constructions. Mielke's book is a comprehensive survey on these investigations since the times of Einstein, Weyl and Cartan through Kaluza, Klein, Wheeler and Yang up to contemporary successors like the author himself. The structure of the book is as follows. Chapter 1 is a summary of the historical background and also serves as a motivation. Chapter 2 is a short summary of the necessary mathematical background: differentiable manifolds, fiber bundle theory, tensor, spinor and exterior calculus on manifolds, connections and curvature, topological invariants. Chapters 3--6 contain an introduction into Yang-Mills theory, Einstein-Cartan theory of gravity and into the early attempts to reformulate general relativity in terms Yang-Mills theory. Chapter 7 contains an introduction into Yang's theory of gravity and various SKY gravity theories. Chapters 8--12 review the various quantum field theoretic aspects (including BRST quantization, instantons, chiral anomalies, three dimensional quantum gravity theories) of the geometrization program. Finally, Chapter 13 and especially Chapters 14,15,16 contain the highlight of the book, namely the possibility and the current state of art to describe material particles as various geometric objects like wormholes, micro black holes, small asymptotically flat regions attached to space-time, etc. Higher dimensional unificatons such as Kaluza-Klein theory and its modern variants are also surveyed. The possible consequences of these descriptions of matter in the theory of strong interactions, with special attention to quark confinement, are also discussed. About the stile and actuality of the book: this book mainly uses physicists' terminology and notation. The short mathematical introduction (Chapter 2) probably cannot provide a sufficiently solid mathematical basis hence in the reviewer's opinion it is worth knowing the necessary mathematical background already in advance. Some current topics, like the relevance of exotic smooth structures in four dimensions or Atiyah's recent geometrization efforts of atoms in terms of compact complex surfaces, are just partially mentioned or not included.