teleparallelism

Teleparallelism (also called teleparallel gravity), was an attempt by Albert Einstein to base a unified theory of electromagnetism and gravity on the mathematical structure of distant parallelism, also referred to as absolute or teleparallelism. In this theory, a spacetime is characterized by a curvature-free linear connection in conjunction with a metric tensor field, both defined in terms of a dynamical tetrad field.

==Teleparallel spacetimes== The crucial new idea, for Einstein, was the introduction of a tetrad field, i.e., a set {{math|{X1, X2, X3, X4}}} of four vector fields defined on all of such that for every the set {{math|{X1(p), X2(p), X3(p), X4(p)}}} is a basis of , where denotes the fiber over of the tangent vector bundle . Hence, the four-dimensional spacetime manifold must be a parallelizable manifold. The tetrad field was introduced to allow the distant comparison of the direction of tangent vectors at different points of the manifold, hence the name distant parallelism. His attempt failed because there was no Schwarzschild solution in his simplified field equation.