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October 13, 20250 citationsOpen Access

Pure Shape Dynamics: Relational General Relativity

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PFPooya FarokhiTKTim KoslowskiPNPedro Naranjo

Key Points

  • The Pure Shape Dynamics framework eliminates absolute scale and external time, enhancing relationalism in gravity.
  • This study derives a decoupled dynamical system that governs spatial conformal geometry without independent dynamical variables.
  • It shows structural analogies between the equation of state in PSD and the Newtonian N-body problem, reinforcing key similarities.
  • Applications include the Bianchi IX cosmological model, where Big Bang evolution is a generic feature of the PSD description.

Abstract

We present a Pure Shape Dynamics (PSD) formulation of General Relativity (GR), which implements full relationalism by eliminating absolute scale and external time references from the fundamental description of gravity. Starting from the Arnowitt-Deser-Misner (ADM) formulation, we derive a decoupled dynamical system that governs the evolution of the spatial conformal geometry and relational matter degrees of freedom, while eliminating the total volume and York time as independent dynamical variables. This results in an autonomous subsystem describing an unparametrized trajectory in the conformal superspace of metric and matter configurations, with its evolution encoded in an equation of state that characterises the intrinsic geometric properties of the curve in shape space. We show that this equation of state is structurally analogous to the corresponding PSD description of the Newtonian N-body problem, reinforcing the fundamental similarity between gravity and relational particle dynamics. Our framework is applied to the homogeneous Bianchi IX cosmological model, demonstrating that the Janus point evolution through the Big Bang, as previously found in a symmetry-reduced setting, is a generic feature of the full inhomogeneous PSD description. This work establishes PSD as a fully scale- and reparametrization-invariant formulation of classical gravity and lays the foundation for addressing key open questions that are discussed at the end of the paper.

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Cite This Study

Farokhi et al. (2025) studied this question.

synapsesocial.com/papers/68ece2abd1bb2827d129713ahttps://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2503.00996
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