What can Physics learn from Continuum Mechanics ?

Abstract

This paper is mostly a collection of ideas already published by various authors, some of them even a long time ago. Its intention is to bring the reader to know some rather unknown papers of different fields that merit interest and to show some relations between them the author claims to have observed. In the first section, some comments on old unresolved problems in theoretical physics are collected. In the following, I shall explain what relation exists between Feynman graphs and the teleparallel theory of Einstein and Cartan in the late 1920s, and the relation of both to the theories of the incompressible aether around 1840. Reviewing these developments, we will have a look at the continuum theory of dislocations developed by Kroener in the 1950s and some techniques of differential geometry and topology relevant for a modern description of defects in continous media. I will then illustrate some basic concepts of nonlinear continuum mechanics and discuss applications to the above theories. By doing so, I hope to attract attention to the possible relevance of these facts for `fundamental' physics.