In 1986, Abhay Ashtekar reformulated Einstein's general relativity in a language closer to that of the rest of fundamental physics.[citation needed] Shortly after, Ted Jacobson and Lee Smolin realized that the formal equation of quantum gravity, called the Wheeler–DeWitt equation, admitted solutions labelled by loops when rewritten in the new Ashtekar variables. Carlo Rovelli and Lee Smolin defined a nonperturbative and background-independent quantum theory of gravity in terms of these loop solutions. Jorge Pullin and Jerzy Lewandowski understood that the intersections of the loops are essential for the consistency of the theory, and the theory should be formulated in terms of intersecting loops, or graphs.
In 1994, Rovelli and Smolin showed that the quantum operators of the theory associated to area and volume have a discrete spectrum. That is, geometry is quantized. This result defines an explicit basis of states of quantum geometry, which turned out to be labelled by Roger Penrose's spin networks, which are graphs labelled by spins.
The canonical version of the dynamics was put on firm ground by Thomas Thiemann, who defined an anomaly-free Hamiltonian operator, showing the existence of a mathematically consistent background-independent theory. The covariant or spin foam version of the dynamics developed during several decades, and crystallized in 2008, from the joint work of research groups in France, Canada, UK, Poland, and Germany, leading to the definition of a family of transition amplitudes, which in the classical limit can be shown to be related to a family of truncations of general relativity.[3] The finiteness of these amplitudes was proven in 2011.[4][5] It requires the existence of a positive cosmological constant, and this is consistent with observed acceleration in the expansion of the Universe.
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