English

Mining metrics for buried treasure

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2009-11-10 v2

Abstract

The same but different: That might describe two metrics. On the surface CLASSI may show two metrics are locally equivalent, but buried beneath one may be a wealth of further structure. This was beautifully described in a paper by M.A.H. MacCallum in 1998. Here I will illustrate the effect with two flat metrics -- one describing ordinary Minkowski spacetime and the other describing a three-parameter family of Gal'tsov-Letelier-Tod spacetimes. I will dig out the beautiful hidden classical singularity structure of the latter (a structure first noticed by Tod in 1994) and then show how quantum considerations can illuminate the riches. I will then discuss how quantum structure can help us understand classical singularities and metric parameters in a variety of exact solutions mined from the Exact Solutions book.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.gr-qc/0412137,
  title  = {Mining metrics for buried treasure},
  author = {D. A. Konkowski and T. M. Helliwell},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:gr-qc/0412137},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

16 pages, no figures, minor grammatical changes, submitted to Proceedings of the Malcolm@60 Conference (London, July 2004)

R2 v1 2026-07-22T12:41:49.438Z