Gravitational Observables and Local Symmetries

1993/06/24 by C. G. Torre, Charles G Torre · 1 voice · 5 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Differential Geometry Research #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #gr-qc #hep-th

paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.48.r2373

published as Phys.Rev.D48:2373-2376,1993 · 10 pages

arxiv created 1993/06/24 · arxiv published 1993/06/24 · arxiv updated 1993/06/24 · openalex publication_date 1993/09/15 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

Using a recent classification of local symmetries of the vacuum Einstein equations, it is shown that there can be no observables for the vacuum gravitational field (in a closed universe) built as spatial integrals of local functions of Cauchy data and their derivatives.

Cited by

• Observables are glocal
• Challenges for Emergent Gravity
• Quantum gravity observables: observation, algebras, and mathematical structure
• Classification of local generalized symmetries for the vacuum Einstein equations
• Quantum gravity: a progress report

Discussions

• There are a lot of papers written by R.P Woodard. But even classical GR does not have local gauge-invariant observables (see Torre's review arXiv:gr-qc/9306030 ), so I am not sure we should be surpris [stackexchange, 4 points]

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