General Relativity as a Collection of Collections of Models

Abstract

One usually identifies a particular collection of geometric objects with the models of general relativity. But within this standard collection lurk ‘physically unreasonable’ models of spacetime. If such models are ruled out, attention can be restricted to some sub-collection of ‘physically reasonable’ models which can be considered a (non-standard) variant theory of general relativity. Since we have yet to identify a privileged sub-collection of ‘physically reasonable’ models, it is helpful to think of ‘general relativity’ in a pluralistic way; we can study a collection of such ‘physically reasonable’ collections of models.