Einstein versus Maxwell: is gravitation a curvature of space, or a field in flat space, or both?
I elaborate on two proposals made in literature. In 1999 Babak and Grishchuk derived the gravitational energy momentum tensor by describing, a la Maxwell, gravitation as a field in Minkowski space. The result can be used to rewrite the Einstein equations in a form involving the total energy momentum tensor of gravitation plus matter. This leads to new viewpoints in cosmology: cancellation of gravitational and matter energy; galaxies not moving in the course of time. In 1989 Logunov added a small bimetric coupling between the Riemann and Minkowski metrics, which breaks general coordinate invariance. This allows to regularize the interior of Schwarzschild black holes (no zeroes or infinities at the horizon), so that time keeps its ordinary role inside.
Institute for Theoretical Physics, Amsterdam
Speaker
-
Theo NIEUWENHUIZEN
