Phone Book's Fans: Shocking Claim on Torsion

[dextercioby]

Here's something for the phone book's fans to chew on:

Surprisingly, on page #1278, in the index entry "Torsion", the 3 authors claim that "(torsion) not present in affine connection if equivalence principle is valid" and hint further to page #250 where they don't debate on it.

However, this assertion is terribly wrong, as Milutin Blagoevic' quoting [1] on page #66 of his book ("Gravitation and gauge symmetries") states after proving.

Surely, they wrote the book 3 years before the proof, but anyways, how could they do that ? They were already aware of both Cartan's theory (GR with torsion) and Lorentz gauge theory pioneered by Utiyama in his groundbreaking article in 1956 and refined by Sciama & Kibble.

Daniel.

[1]P von der Heyde [1975] "The equivalence principle in the U_{4} theory of gravity", Nuovo Cim. Lett. 14, 250.

 

[Demystifier]

I guess MTW are humans too. Besides, they are experts for GR, but not for theories with torsion.

 

[Chris Hillman]

Different parts of the book were authored by the three coauthors, so one of them might have referred to material discussed in chapters written by another of the trio.

MTW has very, very few misstatements (I haven't tried to verify the claim that you uncovered one, but this is certainly possible).

Chris Hillman