2012/11/10 by Xiang-Song Chen, Chen, Xiang-Song
Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc) #Relativity and Gravitational Theory
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1211.2360
openalex publication_date 2012/11/10 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
It has been tested precisely that the inertial and gravitational masses are equal. Here we reveal that the inertial and gravitational momenta may differ. More generally, the inertial and gravitational energy-momentum tensors may not coincide: Einstein's general relativity requires the gravitational energy-momentum tensor to be symmetric, but we show that a symmetric inertial energy-momentum tensor would ruin the concordance between conservations of quantized energy and charge. The nonsymmetric feature of the inertial energy-momentum tensor can be verified unambiguously by measuring the transverse flux of a collimated spin-polarized electron beam, and leads to a serious implication that the equivalence principle and Einstein's gravitational theory cannot be both exact.