Tuesday, 15 November 2016

general relativity - Can we always locally split the metric as $- N^2dt^2+g_{ij}dx^idx^j$?


In the book by Y. Choquet-Bruhat, General Relativity and the Einstein Equations, the following technical lemma is found on page 9:



A Lorentzian metric can always be written in a small enough neighborhood by a change of coordinates under the form $$-N^2dt^2+g_{ij}dx^idx^j.$$



The proof (I think that's what it's supposed to be) she gives makes little sense:




Indeed, under a change of coordinates $(x'^\alpha)\mapsto (x^\beta)$ with $x^0=x'^0$ we have $$g'_{i0}=\frac{\partial x^j}{\partial x'^i}\left(g_{j0}+g_{jh}\frac{\partial x^h}{\partial x'^0}\right),$$ we make $g_{i0}'=0$ by solving the linear first-order system $g_{j0}+g_{jh}\frac{\partial x^h}{\partial x'^0}=0$ for the functions $x^h(x'^i,x'^0)$.



The reason this is problematic is that we assumed $x^0=x'^0$, so that in fact $x^h$ cannot be a function of $x'^0$, and the linear system falls apart.


Am I misinterpreting what she's saying? Can the proof be salvaged or is this a bad typo? Is the result true?




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