Talk:Non-relativistic general relativity

COI tag (June 2022)

The creator and main contributor of this article is also the author of the source this article primarily relies on. Singularity42 (talk) 16:34, 30 June 2022 (UTC)

Not a notable topic

As far as I can tell "Non-relativistic gravitational field" only appears in

• Kol, B., & Smolkin, M. (2008). Non-relativistic gravitation: from Newton to Einstein and back. Classical and Quantum Gravity, 25(14), 145011.

referring to "a decomposition of the metric into “Kaluza-Klein type” potentials" per page 27 in

• Blanchet, L. (2024). Post-Newtonian theory for gravitational waves. Living Reviews in Relativity, 27(1), 4.

According to Blanchet and to

• Levi, M. (2020). Effective field theories of post-Newtonian gravity: a comprehensive review. Reports on Progress in Physics, 83(7), 075901.

the content here is one aspect of Effective field theory § Gravitational field theories which Blanchet says are also called "non-relativistic general relativity" which is a notable topic.

However non-relativistic gravity and non-relativistic general relativity are not always synonyms.

• Hartong, J., Obers, N. A., & Oling, G. (2023). Review on non-relativistic gravity. Frontiers in Physics, 11, 1116888.
• Hansen, D., Hartong, J., & Obers, N. A. (2019). Gravity between newton and einstein. International Journal of Modern Physics D, 28(14), 1944010.

Nevertheless I think renaming this article to non-relativistic general relativity and repositioning it as covering Effective field theory § Gravitational field theories would be an improvement. Johnjbarton (talk) 19:48, 18 March 2026 (UTC)

John, did you check the prior merge discussion? The concensus was to merge, which @Stepwise Continuous Dysfunction did in the edit you reverted, see {{Being merged to|Parameterized post-Newtonian formalism|discuss=Talk:Parameterized post-Newtonian formalism|date=April 2023}} That also refs to Talk:Gravitational field#Proposed merge of Non-Relativistic Gravitational Fields into Gravitational field. There were about ~5 votes for these merges. At the very least I think you should ping all the prior voters. Ldm1954 (talk) 02:29, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

I pinged everyone in the next Topic. Johnjbarton (talk) 03:31, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

What happened here

In Talk:Gravitational field#Proposed merge of Non-Relativistic Gravitational Fields into Gravitational field editor @Singularity42 suggested a merge, @Fountains of Bryn Mawr supported, @Barak.K.huji opposed but did not do so boldly, @JRSpriggs opposed, favoring delete or merge in to Parameterized post-Newtonian formalism, @Chetvorno same. Or so I claim.

But then nothing. No one merged. Despite proding. So I looked into the sources. "Non-relativistic gravitational fields" is a phrase used by one set of authors in about four primary papers. Their work is related to Effective field theories for gravity. But it is just one aspect of the bigger and clearly notable topic "non-relativistic general relativity" with several reviews.

I found no sources relating Parameterized post-Newtonian formalism to the works coming from the effective field theory. All of the sources, both "parameterized" and "effective" are about "post Newtonian approximations", but a parameterized effective field theory would not make sense: the effective field theory concept already has a systematic procedure for connecting to observations, one does not need "parameterization". So the closest redirect would be Effective field theory § Gravitational field theories but nothing was said about the topic there.

I suppose I should have created new process but I took the long standing lack of interest as a hint and boldly moved the original article here, to the notable topic "Non-relativistic general relativity". Then I edited the page to more closely match the article title. Obviously this article can use more work.

The net effect is that we merged the old article in to a new one on the broader and more notable topic. I hope this is suitable. Over all we are weak on effective field theory which is the direction that a lot of theoretical physics has gone during the time Wikipedia grew up. Johnjbarton (talk) 03:31, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

Counting components

The section Non-relativistic general relativity § Non-relativistic gravitational field expansion mentions $g_{00}$, $g_{0i}$, $g_{ij}$, and $\sigma _{ij}$, where $i,j=1,2,3$. So $g$ has 1+3+3*3=13 components, and $\sigma$ has 3*3=9 components. But the next paragraph says:

Counting components, $g_{\mu \nu }$ has 10, while $\phi$ has 1, ${\vec {A}}$ has 3 and finally $\sigma _{ij}$ has 6.

What's wrong? If there was a condition $i\neq j$, the numbers in the second paragraph would make sense: $g$ has 1+3+3*3-3=10 components, and $\sigma$ has 3*3-3=6 components. But I'm just guessing here. Is there such a condition? Should we add it after $i,j=1,2,3$? — Chrisahn (talk) 08:37, 7 April 2026 (UTC)