Can general-relativistic description of gravitation be considered complete?

Abstract

The local galactic cluster, the Great attractor, embeds us in a dimensionless gravitational potential of about - 3 x 10^{-5}. In the solar system this potential is constant to about 1 part in 10^{11}. Consequently, planetary orbits, which are determined by the gradient in the gravitational potential, remain unaffected. However, this is not so for the recently introduced flavor-oscillation clocks where the new redshift-inducing phases depend on the gravitational potential itself. On these grounds, and by studying the invariance properties of the gravitational phenomenon in the weak fields, we argue that there exists an element of incompleteness in the general-relativistic description of gravitation. An incompleteness-establishing inequality is derived and an experiment is outlined to test the thesis presented.

Essay Awarded "Honorable Mention" by Gravity Research Foundation (1998). The answer to the question posed in the title is an experimentally verifiable "no."

References in corpus (1)

• On a New Non-Geometric Element in Gravity

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• On a Quantum Equivalence Principle
• On a generalized gravitational Aharonov-Bohm effect
• Flavor-oscillation clocks, continuous quantum measurements and a violation of Einstein equivalence principle
• Quantum-Mechanical Detection of Non-Newtonian Gravity
• Aharonov-Bohm Effect and Coordinate Transformations
• Decoherence-induced violations of Einstein equivalence principle
• Quantum nondemolition measurements of a particle in electric and gravitational fields