QUANTUM-GRAVITY WITHOUT GHOSTS

We give an outline of a recently discovered technique for building qua ntum effective action that is completely independent of gauge-fixing c hoices and ghost determinants. One makes maximum use of the geometry a nd fiber bundle structure of the space of field histories and introduc es a set of nonlocal composite fields: the geodesic normal fields base d on Vilkovisky's connection on the space of histories. The closed-tim e-path formalism of Schwinger, Bakshi, Mahantappa ct al. can be adapte d for these fields, and a set of gauge-fixing-independent dynamical eq uations for their expectation values (starting from given initial cond itions) can be computed. An obvious application for such equations is to the study of the formation and radiative decay of black holes, and to other back-reaction problems.