Quantization of conformal gravity: Another approach to the renormalization of gravity

The non-renormalizability of quantum gravity poses a great problem to the construction of any unified field theory of all known interactions. Normally, we start with a unitary theory of gravity and investigate its renormalization properties. This is the first of a series of papers where we start with the opposite approach, beginning with a renormalizable theory and investigating its unitarity structure. In particular, we study non-perturbative approaches to the quantization of conformal gravity. Using ADM coordinates, we perform the canonical quantization of the Weyl action C_μναβ², which is renormalizable and is also local scale invariant. Although this theory is certainly not unitary in perturbation theory, we speculate that unitarity may be restored when we approach this theory non-perturbatively, by examining the possibility of different phase transitions.