English

More on the fact that Rastall = GR

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2024-07-11 v3 High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

Rastall gravity is the same as General Relativity, with a simple algebraic redefinition of what is called the energy-momentum tensor. Despite it having been very clearly explained by M. Visser several years go, there are still many papers claiming big differences between the two formulations of gravitational equations and trying to use them for problems of physics. When going this way, the totally ignored task is to explain why the conserved energy-momentum quantities and the quantities used for other purposes are different from each other. Moreover, when researchers are using the non-conserved energy density and pressure for determining the sound speed, it is just inconsistent with the Rastall gravity. I carefully explain all this, and also show how one could construct a variational principle for producing equations in the Rastall form.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2311.00131,
  title  = {More on the fact that Rastall = GR},
  author = {Alexey Golovnev},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2311.00131},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

6 pages; minor additions

R2 v1 2026-06-28T13:07:57.919Z