Gravitation as anholonomy (Q1398088)

Anholonomy -- the property of a differential form which is not the differential of anything, or of a vector field which is not a gradient -- is commonplace in many chapters of Physics. Heat and work, for instance, are typical anholonomic coordinates on the space of thermodynamic variables, and the angular velocity of a generic rigid body is a classical example of anholonomic velocity. In gravitation theory, however, anholonomy does not seem to have had its pervading role as emphasized as it should. The authors intend to fill in that gap, by bringing to the forefront the anholonomic character of some well-known features. In this paper, a gravitational field is seen as the anholonomy of the tetrad fields. This is more explicit in the teleparallel approach, in which the gravitational field-strength is the torsion of the ensuing Weitzenböck connection. In a tetrad frame, that torsion is just the anholonomy of that frame. The infinitely many tetrad fields taking the Lorentz metric into a given Riemannian metric differ by point-dependent Lorentz transformations. Inertial frames constitute a smaller infinity of them, differing by fixed-point Lorentz transformations. Holonomic tetrads take the Lorentz metric into itself, and correspond to Minkowski flat spacetime. An accelerated frame is necessarily anholonomic and sees the electromagnetic field strength with an additional term.