Found Phys
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10701-018-0137-4
Energy and Uncertainty in General Relativity
F. I. Cooperstock
1
· M. J. Dupre
2
Received: 5 June 2017 / Accepted: 2 January 2018
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2018
Abstract The issue of energy and its potential localizability in general relativity has
challenged physicists for more than a century. Many non-invariant measures were
proposed over the years but an invariant measure was never found. We discovered
the invariant localized energy measure by expanding the domain of investigation
from space to spacetime. We note from relativity that the finiteness of the velocity
of propagation of interactions necessarily induces indefiniteness in measurements.
This is because the elements of actual physical systems being measured as well as
their detectors are characterized by entire four-velocity fields, which necessarily leads
to information from a measured system being processed by the detector in a spread of
time. General relativity adds additional indefiniteness because of the variation in proper
time between elements. The uncertainty is encapsulated in a generalized uncertainty
principle, in parallel with that of Heisenberg, which incorporates the localized contri-
bution of gravity to energy. This naturally leads to a generalized uncertainty principle
for momentum as well. These generalized forms and the gravitational contribution to
localized energy would be expected to be of particular importance in the regimes of
ultra-strong gravitational fields. We contrast our invariant spacetime energy measure
with the standard 3-space energy measure which is familiar from special relativity,
appreciating why general relativity demands a measure in spacetime as opposed to
3-space. We illustrate the misconceptions by certain authors of our approach.
B F. I. Cooperstock
cooperst@uvic.ca
M. J. Dupre
mdupre@tulane.edu
1
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Victoria, P.O. Box 3055, Victoria,
BC V8W 3P6, Canada
2
Department of Mathematics, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA 70118, USA
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