Related papers: Is the gravitational action additive?
The Weiss variational principle in mechanics and classical field theory is a variational principle which allows displacements of the boundary. We review the Weiss variation in mechanics and classical field theory, and present a novel…
Gravity stands apart from other fundamental interactions in that it is locally equivalent to an accelerated frame and can be transformed away. Again it is indistinguishable from the geometry of space-time (which is an arena for all other…
The effects of physical interactions are usually incorporated into the quantum theory by including the corresponding terms in the Hamiltonian. Here we consider the effects of including the gravitational potential energy of massive particles…
Gravity is understood as a geometrization of spacetime. But spacetime is also the manifold of the boundary values of the spinless point particle in a variational approach. Since all known matter, baryons, leptons and gauge bosons are…
The motion of sufficiently small body in general relativity should be accurately described by a geodesic. However, there should be ``gravitational self-force'' corrections to geodesic motion, analogous to the ``radiation reaction forces''…
We construct the gravitating mass of an isolated composite system on asymptotically-flat spacetimes within conventional general relativity and investigate when this quantity is well defined. For stationary spacetimes, this quantity is known…
We have recently shown that both passive and active gravitational masses of a composite body are not equivalent to its energy due to some quantum effects. We have also suggested an idealized and more realistic experiments to detect the…
Physicists and philosophers are increasingly prone to regarding our current physical theories as providing 'effective descriptions' of real-world systems. In the context of quantum gravity research, this fuels a common view that the…
We consider the formulation of entropic gravity in two spacetime dimensions. The usual gravitational force law is derived even in the absence of area, as normally required by the holographic principle. A special feature of this perspective…
General relativity describes the gravitational field geometrically and in a self-interacting way because it couples to all forms of energy, including its own. Both features make finding a quantum theory difficult, yet it is important in the…
As observed recently in arXiv:1212.2922, the action of General Relativity (GR) in finite spacetime regions has an imaginary part that resembles the Bekenstein entropy. In this paper, we expand on that argument, with attention to different…
Newton's action at a distance gravitational law and Coulomb's action at a distance electrostatic law had to be reexamined in the light of field theories which originated from Maxwell's electrodynamics. These ideas were further modified with…
There is a venerable position in the philosophy of space and time that holds that the geometry of spacetime is conventional, provided one is willing to postulate a "universal force field". Here we ask a more focused question, inspired by…
General relativity is a background-independent theory of a dynamical classical spacetime geometry. Quantum theory is formulated in a classical spacetime, as an intrinsically probabilistic, contextual theory of non-classical, interfering…
After a preliminary discussion of the relevance of the field nature of gravitation interaction, both for the fundamental interaction of particles and the topology of space time, a method is proposed to produce and detect a dynamical…
The Einstein-Hilbert action (and thus the dynamics of gravity) can be obtained by combining the principle of equivalence, special relativity and quantum theory in the Rindler frame and postulating that the horizon area must be proportional…
This article gives an elementary account of the recently proposed theory of spontaneous quantum gravity. It is argued that a viable quantum theory of gravity should be falsifiable, and hence it should dynamically explain the observed…
We generalize the concept of a field by allowing addition to be a partial operation. We show that elements of such a "partially additive field" share many similarities with physical quantities. In particular, they form subsets of mutually…
A specific theoretical framework is important for designing and conducting an experiment, and for interpretation of its results. The field of gravitational physics is expanding, and more clarity is needed. It appears that some popular…
We have recently presented a manifestly local and general coordinate invariant formulation of a nonlocal approach to the cosmological constant problem. In this article, we investigate quantum effects from both matter and gravitational…