Local and global gravity

Abstract

Our long experience with Newtonian potentials has inured us to the view that gravity only produces local effects. In this paper we challenge this quite deeply ingrained notion and explicitly identify some intrinsically global gravitational effects. In particular we show that the global cosmological Hubble flow can actually modify the motions of stars and gas within individual galaxies, and even do so in a way which can apparently eliminate the need for galactic dark matter. Also we show that a classical light wave acquires an observable, global, path dependent phase in traversing a gravitational field. Both of these effects serve to underscore the intrinsic difference between non-relativistic and relativistic gravity.

LaTeX, 20 pages plus three figures in two postscript files. To appear in a special issue of Foundations of Physics honoring Professor Lawrence Horwitz on the occasion of his 65th birthday; A. van der Merwe and S. Raby, Editors, Plenum Publishing Company, N.Y., 1997

References in corpus (5)

• Can Conformal Weyl Gravity be Considered a Viable Cosmological Theory?
• Open Questions in Classical Gravity
• Conformal cosmology and the age of the universe
• Cosmology and galactic rotation curves
• Classical Underpinnings of Gravitationally Induced Quantum Interference

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• A Kinematical Approach to Conformal Cosmology
• The Cosmological Constant Problem, an Inspiration for New Physics
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• Dark Matter: a Challenge to Standard Gravity or a Warning?