Recent Talks

Things should be made simple, but not simpler.

What we want to show is that General Relativity, as it stands today, can be considered as a gravitational theory of low velocity spinless matter, and therefore a restricted theory of gravitation.

Gravity is understood as a geometrization of spacetime. But spacetime is also the manifold of the boundary values of the spinless point particle in a variational approach. Since all known elementary matter, baryons, leptons and gauge bosons are spinning objects, it means that the manifold, which we call the kinematical space, where we play the game of the variational formalism of a classical elementary particle must be greater than spacetime.

Mathematics shows that this manifold for any arbitrary mechanical system is always a Finsler metric space, such that the variational formalism can be interpreted as a geodesic problem on this metric space.

This manifold is just the flat Minkowski space for the free spinless particle.  Any interaction modifies its flat Finsler metric as gravitation does.

The same thing happens for the spinning objects, but now the Finsler metric space has more dimensions and its metric is modified by any interaction, so that to reduce gravity to the modification only of the metric of the spacetime submanifold is to make a simpler theory, the gravitational theory of spinless matter.

Even the usual assumption that the modification of the metric only produces a Riemannian metric of the spacetime is also a restriction because in general the coefficients for a Finsler metric, are also dependent on the velocities. Removal of the velocity dependence of metric coefficients is equivalent to consider the restriction to low velocity matter.

In the spirit of unification of all forces, gravity cannot produce, in principle, a different and simpler geometrization than any other interaction.

References: arXiv: 1203.4076

The exponential radial profiles of spiral galaxies have been observed for decades with various explanations offered, but none of these explanations hold up now that the profiles have been traced to 10 scale lengths in some cases. Profiles with breaks also have their outer parts remarkably close to exponential. This is true in both spirals and dwarfs, with a particular problem for non-barred dwarfs where there are no strong torques or shears in the stellar disks for radial scattering. We have shown that scattering from disk clumps can make exponentials, and indeed dwarfs have fairly massive clumps and irregularities in their HI distributions. Spiral waves also have clumps in the form of persistent wave enhancements at corotation and at points of wave interference. This talk reviews the observations of exponential profiles and profile breaks in spiral and dwarf galaxies, and considers various theories to explain them.