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How do you measure gravitational disorder in the most general spacetimes?

Maharshi Sarma, Sebastián Nájera, Roberto A. Sussman

May 20, 2026

A promising way to define gravitational entropy — how disordered or clumpy a gravitational field is — has been stuck working only in highly symmetric spacetimes. Sarma, Nájera, and Sussman push it into the most general case (Petrov Type I), where the underlying math has multiple valid decompositions rather than a unique one, and test it on an exact cosmological solution. The ambiguity they uncover matters: different choices of decomposition can yield different entropy values, raising a foundational question about whether gravitational entropy is well-defined in generic spacetimes.
Published as Gravitational entropy in Petrov Type I spacetimes arXiv:2605.20611
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