  It is well-known that perturbative quantum gravity is non-renormalizable. The
metric or vierbein has generally been used as the variable to quantize in
perturbative quantum gravity. In this essay, we show that one can use the spin
connection instead, in which case it is possible to obtain a ghost-free
renormalizable theory of quantum gravity. Furthermore in this approach,
gravitational analogs of particle physics phenomena can be studied. In
particular, we study the gravitational Higgs mechanism using spin connection as
a gauge field, and show that this provides a mechanism for the effective
reduction in the dimensionality of spacetime.
