Subject: Anti-symmetric Connection
Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2008 12:07:45 EST
To Charles Kellum in Virginia:
The standard model made a fatal error in adopting the symmetric connection, probably because its use was initially guesswork, or for ease of calculation. The commutator of covariant derivatives was unknown at that time. It looks as if the symmetric connection was adopted by Ricci and Levi-Civita in 1900. I am not sure whether Christoffel used it himself. A historian of science may help us here. At that time the torsion tensor seems to have been unknown, so it seemed natural to build up the Christoffel symbol from the symmetric metric without taking account of torsion at all. This is the traditional method given by Carroll at the start of his chapter three. Carroll then introduces the torsion, briefly, but then discards it again. At the end of chapter three he introduces the Cartan structure equations, and defines torsion, but again makes no further use of it in the book. His final chapters roll out the old dogma and are full of errors.
We can already see that the dogmatists are attempting to ignore the major advances now being made by ECE and are still sticking to an incorrect connection. This is what I mean by the deliberate and cynical propagation of pseudo-science by those with vested interest. Their reputations lie in dust, while the practically minded engineers begin to put ECE to work on a computer, as we see from the excellent papers this morning.
So we see the mythology of standard relativity self destructing before our computer screens. It is pretty easy to guess then that the whole of the global warming thing is guesswork at best, totally wrong at worst.