Conservation of vector-valued forms and the question of the existence of gravitational energy-momentum in general relativity (Q756735): Difference between revisions

In a recent paper, K. Dalton has shown that in general relativity conserved vector valued currents have null covariant derivatives and has discussed the corollary that there is no gravitational energy momentum expression in general relativity. An equivalent statement was given already by E. Cartan in 1922. Given the potential implications of Dalton's corollary the authors reproduce in their paper Cartan's contribution to this problem in a more modern, very powerful and relatively simple language. For comparison also the gravitational sector of teleparallelism theories with torsion are investigated. The conservation laws of these theories are global. The authors conclude from this that ``several unaesthetic features of general relativity'' should be viewed as real problems and not as a necessary consequence of the geometrization of physics.