Andrzej Trautman 1999 Class. Quantum Grav. 16 A157 doi:10.1088/0264-9381/16/12A/308
Andrzej Trautman
Show affiliationsThis is a rather personal review of a few fields of research in which the author has been involved and that he believes to be of relevance in the future. A brief description of the idea of gauge invariance and symmetry breaking is followed by a review of theories of the Kaluza-Klein type and of the Einstein-Cartan theory of gravitation with spin and torsion. It is shown that the early work of Bateman can be considered to provide a basis for an optical geometry in Lorentzian manifolds with shear-free congruences of null geodesics, a notion introduced by Robinson and closely connected to that of algebraically special gravitational fields. There is a natural, one-to-one correspondence between the set of such optical geometries and that of Cauchy-Riemann spaces. A few odd remarks are devoted to the problem of `large numbers', an EIH problem, variational principles and elementary links between gravitation and quantum physics.
04.50.-h Higher-dimensional gravity and other theories of gravity
02.40.Sf Manifolds and cell complexes
04.20.Fy Canonical formalism, Lagrangians, and variational principles
Issue 12A (December 1999)
Received 14 April 1999
Andrzej Trautman 1999 Class. Quantum Grav. 16 A157
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