About: Initial value formulation (general relativity)     Goto   Sponge   NotDistinct   Permalink

An Entity of Type : owl:Thing, within Data Space : dbpedia.demo.openlinksw.com associated with source document(s)
QRcode icon
http://dbpedia.demo.openlinksw.com/describe/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdbpedia.org%2Fresource%2FInitial_value_formulation_%28general_relativity%29

The initial value formulation of general relativity is a reformulation of Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity that describes a universe evolving over time. Each solution of the Einstein field equations encompasses the whole history of a universe – it is not just some snapshot of how things are, but a whole spacetime: a statement encompassing the state of matter and geometry everywhere and at every moment in that particular universe. By this token, Einstein's theory appears to be different from most other physical theories, which specify evolution equations for physical systems; if the system is in a given state at some given moment, the laws of physics allow you to extrapolate its past or future. For Einstein's equations, there appear to be subtle differences compared with other

AttributesValues
rdfs:label
  • Initial value formulation (general relativity) (en)
rdfs:comment
  • The initial value formulation of general relativity is a reformulation of Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity that describes a universe evolving over time. Each solution of the Einstein field equations encompasses the whole history of a universe – it is not just some snapshot of how things are, but a whole spacetime: a statement encompassing the state of matter and geometry everywhere and at every moment in that particular universe. By this token, Einstein's theory appears to be different from most other physical theories, which specify evolution equations for physical systems; if the system is in a given state at some given moment, the laws of physics allow you to extrapolate its past or future. For Einstein's equations, there appear to be subtle differences compared with other (en)
dcterms:subject
Wikipage page ID
Wikipage revision ID
Link from a Wikipage to another Wikipage
Link from a Wikipage to an external page
sameAs
dbp:wikiPageUsesTemplate
has abstract
  • The initial value formulation of general relativity is a reformulation of Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity that describes a universe evolving over time. Each solution of the Einstein field equations encompasses the whole history of a universe – it is not just some snapshot of how things are, but a whole spacetime: a statement encompassing the state of matter and geometry everywhere and at every moment in that particular universe. By this token, Einstein's theory appears to be different from most other physical theories, which specify evolution equations for physical systems; if the system is in a given state at some given moment, the laws of physics allow you to extrapolate its past or future. For Einstein's equations, there appear to be subtle differences compared with other fields: they are self-interacting (that is, non-linear even in the absence of other fields); they are diffeomorphism invariant, so to obtain a unique solution, a fixed background metric and gauge conditions need to be introduced; finally, the metric determines the spacetime structure, and thus the domain of dependence for any set of initial data, so the region on which a specific solution will be defined is not, a priori, defined. There is, however, a way to re-formulate Einstein's equations that overcomes these problems. First of all, there are ways of rewriting spacetime as the evolution of "space" in time; an earlier version of this is due to Paul Dirac, while a simpler way is known after its inventors Richard Arnowitt, Stanley Deser and Charles Misner as ADM formalism. In these formulations, also known as "3+1" approaches, spacetime is split into a three-dimensional hypersurface with and an embedding into spacetime with ; these two quantities are the dynamical variables in a Hamiltonian formulation tracing the hypersurface's evolution over time. With such a split, it is possible to state the initial value formulation of general relativity. It involves initial data which cannot be specified arbitrarily but needs to satisfy specific constraint equations, and which is defined on some suitably smooth three-manifold ; just as for other differential equations, it is then possible to prove existence and uniqueness theorems, namely that there exists a unique spacetime which is a solution of Einstein equations, which is globally hyperbolic, for which is a Cauchy surface (i.e. all past events influence what happens on , and all future events are influenced by what happens on it), and has the specified internal metric and extrinsic curvature; all spacetimes that satisfy these conditions are related by isometries. The initial value formulation with its 3+1 split is the basis of numerical relativity; attempts to simulate the evolution of relativistic spacetimes (notably merging black holes or gravitational collapse) using computers. However, there are significant differences to the simulation of other physical evolution equations which make numerical relativity especially challenging, notably the fact that the dynamical objects that are evolving include space and time itself (so there is no fixed background against which to evaluate, for instance, perturbations representing gravitational waves) and the occurrence of singularities (which, when they are allowed to occur within the simulated portion of spacetime, lead to arbitrarily large numbers that would have to be represented in the computer model). (en)
prov:wasDerivedFrom
page length (characters) of wiki page
foaf:isPrimaryTopicOf
is Link from a Wikipage to another Wikipage of
is foaf:primaryTopic of
Faceted Search & Find service v1.17_git139 as of Feb 29 2024


Alternative Linked Data Documents: ODE     Content Formats:   [cxml] [csv]     RDF   [text] [turtle] [ld+json] [rdf+json] [rdf+xml]     ODATA   [atom+xml] [odata+json]     Microdata   [microdata+json] [html]    About   
This material is Open Knowledge   W3C Semantic Web Technology [RDF Data] Valid XHTML + RDFa
OpenLink Virtuoso version 08.03.3330 as of Mar 19 2024, on Linux (x86_64-generic-linux-glibc212), Single-Server Edition (378 GB total memory, 59 GB memory in use)
Data on this page belongs to its respective rights holders.
Virtuoso Faceted Browser Copyright © 2009-2024 OpenLink Software