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One of the main unanswered question of modern Physics is "How does gravity behave at small scales?". The aim of this thesis is to illustrate in a comprehensive but accessible way how to look for deviations from Einstein's theory of General Relativity in this regime, looking at the simplest celestial bodies: static and spherically symmetric ones. With a conservative and bottom-up approach, at smaller scales the first corrections to the action of General Relativity are generally considered to be terms quadratic in the curvature tensors; while these modifications do not cure the inconsistency between gravity and quantum mechanics, the solutions of this theory are plausible candidates to be the ...
This book covers recent developments in the covariant formulation of quantum gravity. Developed in the 1960s by Feynman and DeWitt, by the 1980s this approach seemed to lead nowhere due to perturbative non-renormalizability. The possibility of non-perturbative renormalizability or 'asymptotic safety', originally suggested by Weinberg but largely ignored for two decades, was revived towards the end of the century by technical progress in the field of the renormalization group. It is now a very active field of research, providing an alternative to other approaches to quantum gravity.Written by one of the early contributors to this subject, this book provides a gentle introduction to the relevant ideas and calculational techniques. Several explicit calculations gradually bring the reader close to the current frontier of research. The main difficulties and present lines of development are also outlined.