A Dually Flat Embedding of Spacetime

Abstract

A model of spacetime is presented. It has an extension to five dimensions, and in five dimensions the geometry is the dual of the Euclidean geometry w.r.t. an arbitrary positive-definite metric. Dually flat geometries are well-known in the context of information geometry. The present work explores their role in describing the geometry of spacetime. It is shown that the positive-definite metric with its flat 5-d connection can coexist with a pseudometric for which the connection is that of Levi–Civita. The 4-d geodesics are characterized by five conserved quantities, one of which can be chosen freely and is taken equal to zero in the present work. An explicit expression for the parallel transport operators is obtained. It is used to construct a pseudometric for spacetime by choosing an arbitrary possibly degenerate inner product in the tangent space of a reference point, for instance, that of Minkowski. By parallel transport, one obtains a pseudometric for spacetime, the metric connection of which extends to a 5-d connection with vanishing curvature tensor. The de Sitter space is considered as an example.