scholarly journals General relativity and cosmology

2015 ◽  
Vol 24 (14) ◽  
pp. 1530030
Author(s):  
Martin Bucher ◽  
Wei-Tou Ni

This year marks the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s 1915 landmark paper “Die Feldgleichungen der Gravitation” in which the field equations of general relativity were correctly formulated for the first time, thus rendering general relativity a complete theory. Over the subsequent hundred years, physicists and astronomers have struggled with uncovering the consequences and applications of these equations. This paper, which was written as an introduction to six chapters dealing with the connection between general relativity and cosmology that will appear in the two-volume book One Hundred Years of General Relativity: From Genesis and Empirical Foundations to Gravitational Waves, Cosmology and Quantum Gravity, endeavors to provide a historical overview of the connection between general relativity and cosmology, two areas whose development has been closely intertwined.

The field of gravitational radiation emitted from two moving particles is investigated by means of general relativity. A method of approximation is used, and in the linear approximation retarded potentials corresponding to spherical gravitational waves are introduced. As is already known, the theory in this approximation predicts that energy is lost by the system. The field equations in the second, non-linear, approximation are then considered, and it is shown that the system loses an amount of gravitational mass precisely equal to the energy carried away by the spherical waves of the linear approximation. The result is established for a large class of particle motions, but it has not been possible to determine whether energy is lost in free gravitational motion under no external forces. The main conclusion of this work is that, contrary to opinions frequently expressed, gravitational radiation has a real physical existence, and in particular, carries energy away from the sources.


This paper shows how the ten conserved quantities, recently discovered by E. T. Newman and R. Penrose by essentially geometrical techniques, arise in a direct solution of the Einstein field equations. For static fields it is shown that five of the conserved quantities vanish while the remaining five are expressed in terms of the multipole moments of the source distribution.


Author(s):  
W. F. Chagas-Filho

Loop Quantum Gravity is a theory that attempts to describe the quantum mechanics of the gravitational field based on the canonical quantization of General Relativity. According to Loop Quantum Gravity, in a gravitational field, geometric quantities such as area and volume are quantized in terms of the Planck length. In this paper we present the basic ideas for a future, mathematically more rigorous, attempt to combine black holes and gravitational waves using the quantization of geometric quantities introduced by Loop Quantum Gravity.


2020 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Reiner Georg Ziefle

Newtonian Quantum Gravity (NQG) unifies quantum physics with Newton's theory of gravity and calculates the so-called “general relativistic” phenomena more precisely and in a much simpler way than General Relativity, whose complicated theoretical construct is no longer needed. Newton's theory of gravity is less accurate than Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity. Famous examples are the precise predictions of General Relativity at binary pulsars. This is the reason why relativistic physicists claim that there can be no doubt that Einstein's theory of relativity correctly describes our physical reality. With the example of the famous “Hulse-Taylor binary” (also known as PSR 1913 + 16 or PSR B1913 + 16), the author proves that the so-called “general relativistic phenomena” observed at this binary solar system can be calculated without having any knowledge on relativistic physics. According to philosophical and epistemological criteria, this should not be possible, if Einstein's theory of relativity indeed described our physical reality. Einstein obviously merely developed an alternative method to calculate these phenomena without quantum physics. The reason was that in those days quantum physics was not yet generally taken into account. It is not the first time that a lack of knowledge of the underlying physical phenomena has to be compensated by complicated mathematics. Einstein's theory of general relativity indirectly already includes additional quantum physical effects of gravitation. This is the reason why it cannot be possible to unite Einstein's theory of general relativity with quantum physics, unless one uses “mathematical tricks” that make the additional quantum physical effects disappear again in the end.


2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (14n15) ◽  
pp. 1830013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alain Dirkes

In this paper, we review the theoretical foundations of gravitational waves in the framework of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Following Einstein’s early efforts, we first derive the linearized Einstein field equations and work out the corresponding gravitational wave equation. Moreover, we present the gravitational potentials in the far away wave zone field point approximation obtained from the relaxed Einstein field equations. We close this review by taking a closer look on the radiative losses of gravitating [Formula: see text]-body systems and present some aspects of the current interferometric gravitational waves detectors. Each section has a separate appendix contribution where further computational details are displayed. To conclude, we summarize the main results and present a brief outlook in terms of current ongoing efforts to build a spaced-based gravitational wave observatory.


2007 ◽  
Vol 22 (10) ◽  
pp. 1935-1951 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. SHARIF ◽  
M. AZAM

In this paper, we elaborate the problem of energy–momentum in General Relativity with the help of some well-known solutions. In this connection, we use the prescriptions of Einstein, Landau–Lifshitz, Papapetrou and Möller to compute the energy–momentum densities for four exact solutions of the Einstein field equations. We take the gravitational waves, special class of Ferrari–Ibanez degenerate solution, Senovilla–Vera dust solution and Wainwright–Marshman solution. It turns out that these prescriptions do provide consistent results for special class of Ferrari–Ibanez degenerate solution and Wainwright–Marshman solution but inconsistent results for gravitational waves and Senovilla–Vera dust solution.


2015 ◽  
Vol 30 (27) ◽  
pp. 1550143 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. I. Cooperstock

It is noted that in the broader sense, gravitational waves viewed as spacetime curvature which necessarily accompanies electromagnetic waves at the speed of light, are the routine perception of our everyday experience. We focus on the energy issue and Feynman’s “sticky bead” argument which has been regarded as central in supporting the conclusion that gravitational waves carry energy through the vacuum in general relativity. We discuss the essential neglected aspects of his approach which leads to the conclusion that gravitational waves would not cause Feynman’s bead to heat the stick on which it would supposedly rub. This opens the way to an examination of the entire issue of energy in general relativity. We briefly discuss our naturally-defined totally invariant spacetime energy expression for general relativity incorporating the contribution from gravity. When the cosmological term is included in the field equations, our energy expression includes the vacuum energy as required.


In the preceding paper the author has developed a theory in which the components of the total 4-momentum of a system are given in terms of four invariant integrals. The theory is applied to the axi-symmetric solution of the general relativity field equations for an isolated system generating gravitational waves obtained by Bondi, van der Burg & Metzner. It is shown that the total energy of the system agrees exactly with the definition of mass adopted by these authors. An expression is obtained for the total momentum along the axis of symmetry. A Schwarzschild system in uniform motion is considered as an example of non-radiative motion.


Symmetry ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 216
Author(s):  
Claudio Cremaschini ◽  
Massimo Tessarotto

In this paper the dynamical equation for propagating wave-fronts of gravitational signals in classical general relativity (GR) is determined. The work relies on the manifestly-covariant Hamilton and Hamilton–Jacobi theories underlying the Einstein field equations recently discovered (Cremaschini and Tessarotto, 2015–2019). The Hamilton–Jacobi equation obtained in this way yields a wave-front description of gravitational field dynamics. It is shown that on a suitable subset of configuration space the latter equation reduces to a Klein–Gordon type equation associated with a 4-scalar field which identifies the wave-front surface of a gravitational signal. Its physical role and mathematical interpretation are discussed. Radiation-field wave-front solutions are pointed out, proving that according to this description, gravitational wave-fronts propagate in a given background space-time as waves characterized by the invariant speed-of-light c. The outcome is independent of the actual shape of the same wave-fronts and includes the case of gravitational waves which are characterized by an eikonal representation and propagate in a generic curved space-time along a null geodetics. The same waves are shown: (a) to correspond to the geometric-optics limit of the same curved space-time solutions; (b) to propagate in a flat space-time as plane waves with constant amplitude; (c) to display also the corresponding form of the wave-front in curved space-time. The result is consistent with the theory of the linearized Einstein field equations and the existence of gravitational waves achieved in such an asymptotic regime. Consistency with the non-linear Trautman boundary-value theory is also displayed.


1949 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 209-241 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Einstein ◽  
L. Infeld

The gravitational field manifests itself in the motion of bodies. Therefore the problem of determining the motion of such bodies from the field equations alone is of fundamental importance. This problem was solved for the first time some ten years ago and the equations of motion for two particles were then deduced [1]. A more general and simplified version of this problem was given shortly thereafter [2].Mr. Lewison pointed out to us, that from our approximation procedure, it does not follow that the field equations can be solved up to an arbitrarily high approximation. This is indeed true.


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