Related papers: Exotic smoothness, noncommutative geometry and par…
Recent discoveries in differential topology are reviewed in light of their possible implications for spacetime models and related subjects in theoretical physics. Although not often noted, a particular smoothness (differentiability)…
The problem of possible astrophysical consequences of the existence of exotic differential structures on manifolds is discussed. It is argued that corrections to the curvature of the form of a source like terms should be expected in the…
We review recent developments in differential topology with special concern for their possible significance to physical theories, especially general relativity. In particular we are concerned here with the discovery of the existence of…
The essential role played by differentiable structures in physics is reviewed in light of recent mathematical discoveries that topologically trivial space-time models, especially the simplest one, ${\bf R^4}$, possess a rich multiplicity of…
Recent advances in differential topology single out four-dimensions as being special, allowing for vast varieties of exotic smoothness (differential) structures, distinguished by their handlebody decompositions, even as the coarser…
It seems to be generally accepted that apparently anomalous cosmological observations, such as accelerating expansion, etc., necessarily are inconsistent with standard general relativity and standard matter sources. Following the…
We construct series of examples of exotic smooth structures on compact locally symmetric spaces of noncompact type. In particular, we obtain higher rank examples, which do not support Riemannian metric of nonpositive curvature. The examples…
In the framework of the PDE's algebraic topology, previously introduced by A. Pr\'astaro, are considered {\em exotic differential equations}, i.e., differential equations admitting Cauchy manifolds $N$ identifiable with exotic spheres, or…
In this paper we calculate the effect of the inclusion of exotic smooth structures on typical observables in Euclidean quantum gravity. We do this in the semiclassical regime for several gravitational free-field actions and find that the…
Exotic spinors arise in non-simply connected base manifolds due to the nonequivalent spinor structure. The dynamics of exotic spinors are endowed with an additional differential factor. In this work, we merge the exotic spinor scenario with…
It is well known that in four or more dimensions, there exist exotic manifolds; manifolds that are homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic to each other. More precisely, exotic manifolds are the same topological manifold but have inequivalent…
Four-dimensional spacetime, together with a natural generalisation to extra dimensions, is obtained through an analysis of the structures and symmetries deriving from possible arithmetic expressions for one-dimensional time. On taking the…
We investigate the uniqueness of so-called exotic structures on certain exact symplectic manifolds by looking at how their symplectic properties change under small nonexact deformations of the symplectic form. This allows us to distinguish…
Since the first work on exotic smoothness in physics, it was folklore to assume a direct influence of exotic smoothness to quantum gravity. In the second paper, we calculate the "smoothness structure" part of the path integral in quantum…
Model-theoretic aspects of exotic smoothness were studied long ago uncovering unexpected relations to noncommutative spaces and quantum theory. Some of these relations were worked out in detail in later work. An important point in the…
Beyond black holes and neutron stars, new hypothetical compact objects have been proposed as potential astrophysical entities. In general, their properties have not yet been fully explored or understood, nor has it been proven whether or…
We use a variation of a classical construction of A. Hatcher to construct virtually all stable exotic smooth structures on compact smooth manifold bundles whose fibers have sufficiently large odd dimension (at least twice the base dimension…
We study different types of spacetime singularities which emerge in the context of disformal electrodynamics. The latter is characterized by transformations of the background metric which preserve regular (non-null) solutions of Maxwell…
We give arguments that exotic smooth structures on compact and noncompact 4-manifolds are essential for some approaches to quantum gravity. We rely on the recently developed model-theoretic approach to exotic smoothness in dimension four.…
Since the advent of new pairwise non-diffeomorphic structures on smooth manifolds, it has been questioned whether two topologically identical manifolds could admit different geometries. Not surprisingly, physicists have wondered whether a…