2017/10/31 by R. Michael Jones · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Cosmology #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Differential rotation #Euler's rotation theorem #Hubble's law #Inertial frame of reference #Inflation (cosmology) #Noncommutative and Quantum Gravity Theories #Relativity and Gravitational Theory #Rotation (mathematics) #Scale factor (cosmology) #Vorticity #gr-qc
paper · pdf · doi:10.1007/s10714-020-02696-w
published in General Relativity and Gravitation 52(5) (Springer Science+Business Media) · Published version includes the effects of inflation. Corrected version of Table 4 at http://cires.colorado.edu/~mjones/physics/Table4.pdf shows which rows in the table are affected by inflation. Reference [52] url in published version should be arXiv.org/abs/1710.07720v1
openalex created_date 2017/11/10 · openalex publication_date 2020/05/01 · arxiv created 2020/05/16 · arxiv updated 2020/05/19 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Any reasonable form of quantum gravity can explain (by phase interference) why on a large scale, inertial frames seem not to rotate relative to the average matter distribution in the universe without the need for absolute space, finely tuned initial conditions, or without giving up independent degrees of freedom for the gravitational field. A simple saddlepoint approximation to a path-integral calculation for a perfect fluid cosmology shows that only cosmologies with an average present relative rotation rate smaller than about T^*H2 ≈ 10-71 radians per year could contribute significantly to a measurement of relative rotation rate in our universe, where T^*≈ 10-51 years is the Planck time and H ≈ 10-10 yr-1 is the present value of the Hubble parameter. A more detailed calculation (taking into account that with vorticity, flow lines are not normal to surfaces of constant global time, and approximating the action to second order in the mean square vorticity) shows that the saddlepoint at zero vorticity is isolated and that only cosmologies with an average present relative rotation rate smaller than about T^*H2 a11/2 ≈ 10-73 radians per year could contribute significantly to a measurement of relative rotation rate in our universe, where a1 ≈ 10-4 is the value of the cosmological scale factor at the time when matter became more significant than radiation in the cosmological expansion. This is consistent with measurements indicating a present relative rotation rate less than about 10-20 radians per year. The observed lack of relative rotation may be evidence for the existence of quantum gravity.