Jacques Distler: LQG landscape

I hope that many of you still remember that Jacques Distler is a pioneer of serious blogging about theoretical physics, and also a source of interesting articles - many of them feature math in TeX. The reason why I link to him now is that he has extracted an interesting core of an exchange at CosmicVariance.com and opened a discussion about the following question:

• What kind of matter can be added to loop quantum gravity?

The spectrum of possible LQG-like theories is referred to as the LQG landscape.

Even before Jacques asked this question, Lee Smolin has already provided us with an answer: everything goes, especially all the nice things. Some readers might be satisfied with this surprising statement; others may want to look under the surface. ;-)

The linker-not-thinker and silent character of this blog will escalate tomorrow because of the most awkward flight / train trip to Europe in my life so far: it is plausible that I will have to take train from Frankfurt because of the misorganized, acausal plan of the flights.

Tomorrow evening or Wednesday morning, it is expected that the 500,000th unique visitor will open this blog. Up to the first three people who will send me a #500,000 screenshot will have the opportunity to make a posting here, or donate this right to someone else.