Introduction

In this chapter the key ideas behind Topological Geometrodynamics (TGD) are introduced and an overall view about the structure of the book is given.

The observation that profoundly changed my life was that if space-time is microscopically a 4-dimensional surface in certain 8-dimensional imbedding space H, one can solve the "energy" problem of general relativity, which is due to the fact that the notions of energy and momentum become ill-defined in curved space-time since the corresponding symmetries are lost. The simple arguments fixing the choice of the imbedding space to be H = M⁴XCP₂, that is Cartesian product of Minkowski space of special relativity and complex projective space of 2 complex dimensions, are described. Also the basic implications - such as the notion of geometrization of known classical fields in terms of the induction procedure, and the notion of many-sheeted space-time - are described. The basic objections resolved by TGD view about classical fields and their superposition are considered. The relationship of TGD space-time with the space-time of general relativity understood as macroscopic phenomenological concept is briefly depicted.

TGD leads to several generalizations of existing view about the ontology of physics and these modications are described....

Keywords: Unified theories, gravitation, geometrization of physics, space-time geometry, quantum gravity, Poincare invariance, imbedding space, submanifold geometry, surface, induced metric, induction procedure, geometrization of classical fields, spinor connection, isometries, geometrization of quantum numbers, Kahler geometry, infinite-dimensional geometry, spinor field, zero energy ontology, generalized Feynman diagram.