Torsion or not torsion, that is the question

Abstract

A hypothesis of general relativity is that spacetime torsion vanishes identically. This assumption has no empirical support; in fact, a nonvanishing torsion is compatible with all the experimental tests of general relativity. The first part of this essay specifies the framework that is suitable to test the vanishing-torsion hypothesis, and an interesting relation with the gravitational degrees of freedom is suggested. In the second part, some original empirical tests are proposed based on the observation that torsion induces new interactions between different spin-polarized particles.