Navigation of Spacetime Ships in Unified Gravitational and Electromagnetic Waves

On the basis of a “local” principle of equivalence of general relativity, we consider a navigation in a kind of “4D-ocean” involving measurements of conformally invariant physical properties only. Then, applying the Pfaff theory for PDE to a particular conformally equivariant system of differential equations, we show the dependency of any kind of function describing “spacetime waves”, with respect to 20 parametrizing functions. These latter, appearing in a linear differential Spencer sequence and determining gauge fields of deformations relatively to “ship-metrics” or to “flat spacetime ocean metrics”, may be ascribed to unified electromagnetic and gravitational waves. The present model is based neither on a classical gauge theory of gravitation or a gravitation theory with torsion, nor on any Kaluza-Klein or Weyl type unifications, but rather on a post-Newtonian approach of gravitation in a four dimensional conformal Cosserat spacetime. Date: Preprint INLN 2002/13.