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Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity was proposed a little over a hundred years back. It remained a bedrock of twentieth century physics right up to Quantum Field Theory. However, the failure over several decades to provide a unified…
Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet gravity in five-dimensional spacetime provides an excellent example of a theory that, while including higher-order curvature corrections to General Relativity, still shares many of its features, such as second-order…
Our assumption that spacetime is a continuum leads to many challenges in mathematical physics. Singularities, divergent integrals and the like threaten many of our favorite theories, from Newtonian gravity to classical electrodynamics,…
Witten has presented an argument for the vanishing of the cosmological constant in 2+1 dimensions. This argument is crucially tied to the specific properties of (2+1)-dimensional gravity. We argue that this reasoning can be deconstructed to…
Three of the big puzzles of theoretical physics are the following: (i) There is apparently no time evolution in the dynamics of quantum general relativity, because the allowed quantum states must obey the Hamiltonian constraint. (ii) During…
Admitting non-Riemannian geometries, Double Field Theory extends the notion of spacetime beyond the Riemannian paradigm. We identify a class of singular spacetimes known in General Relativity with regular non-Riemannian geometries. The…
In 1945 Einstein concluded that [1]: 'The present theory of relativity is based on a division of physical reality into a metric field (gravitation) on the one hand, and into an electromagnetic field and matter on the other hand. In reality…
Despite their diversity, many of the most prominent candidate theories of quantum gravity share the property to be effectively lower-dimensional at small scales. In particular, dimension two plays a fundamental role in the finiteness of…
Contemporary research programs in fundamental physics appear to suggest that there could be two (physical) times---or none at all. This essay articulates these possibilities in the context of quantum gravity, and in particular of…
Higher-dimensional theories of the kind which may unify gravitation with particle physics can lead to significant modifications of general relativity. In five dimensions, the vacuum becomes non-standard, and the Weak Equivalence Principle…
We give a brief overview of the nature of spacetime emerging from string theory. This is radically different from the familiar spacetime of Einstein's relativity. At a perturbative level, the spacetime metric appears as ``coupling…
We present an analysis of a n-dimensional vacuum Einstein field equations in which 4-dimensional space-time which is described by a Friedmann Robertson-Walker (FRW) metric and that of the extra dimensions by a Kasner type Euclidean metric.…
Several approaches to quantum gravity (including the model of superplastic vacuum; Diakonov tetrads emerging as the bilinear combinations of the fermionis fields; $BF$-theories of gravity; and effective acoustic metric) suggest that in…
A review of different cosmological models in diverse dimensions leading to a relatively small time variation of the effective gravitational constant G is presented. Among them: 4-dimensional general scalar-tensor model, multidimensional…
The usual equivalence between the Palatini and metric (or affinity and vielbein) formulations of Einstein theory fails in two spacetime dimensions for its "Kaluza--Klein" reduced (as well as for its standard) version. Among the differences…
We discuss two scenarios of emergent gravity. In one of them the quantum vacuum is considered as superplastic crystal, and the effective gravity describes the dynamical elastic deformations of this crystal. In the other one the…
Possibilities emerging out of the dynamical evolutions of collapsing systems are addressed in this thesis through analytical investigations of the highly non-linear Einstein Field Equations. Studies of exact solutions and their properties,…
Considering a n-dimensional general spacetime, we deduce its 4-dimensional Einstein equation and Friedman equations, and discover a general dual relation between the scale factor $a(t)$ of our universe and the scale factor $B(t)$ of extra…
We first review the cosmological constant problem, and then mention a conjecture of Feynman according to which the general relativistic theory of gravity should be reformulated in such a way that energy does not couple to gravity. We point…
The Einsteinian Theory of Gravitation ("General Theory of Relativity") is founded essentially; on the reception that the geometrical properties of the 4-dimensional space-time continuum are defined from the matter in it. Contrary to this,…