English

General Relativity with Local Space-time Defects

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2018-07-17 v2

Abstract

General relativity is incomplete because it cannot describe quantum effects of space-time. The complete theory of quantum gravity is not yet known and to date no observational evidence exists that space-time is quantized. However, in most approaches to quantum gravity the space-time manifold of general relativity is only an effective limit that, among other things like higher curvature terms, should receive corrections stemming from space-time defects. We here develop a modification of general relativity that describes local space-time defects and solve the Friedmann equations. From this, we obtain the time-dependence of the density of defects. It turns out that the defects' density dilutes quickly, somewhat faster even than radiation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1709.02657,
  title  = {General Relativity with Local Space-time Defects},
  author = {Sabine Hossenfelder and Ricardo Gallego Torromé},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1709.02657},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

15 pages, 2 figures, replaced with published version

R2 v1 2026-06-22T21:37:08.483Z