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PeterDonis
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Jonathan Scott said:The conventional assertion is that in GR, the diagonal pressure terms in the tensor effectively contribute to the curvature of space in the same way as energy
More precisely, if you rearrange the terms in the EFE appropriately, they do. Briefly, if you move the trace term from the LHS to the RHS, and look at the 0-0 component of the EFE, you get an equation relating the 0-0 component of the Ricci tensor, which describes the initial inward acceleration of a small ball of test particles, to the sum of the energy density plus three times the pressure at the center of the ball (assuming isotropic pressure). John Baez describes this in more detail here:
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/einstein/node3.html
(The whole article is worth reading, btw.)
But this is all purely local; what you are talking about when you mention Birkhoff's theorem and Tolman's paradox is trying to integrate all this local stuff over a spacelike slice to get the total mass of a system. That's a different question from the question of what terms contribute to the EFE locally.
Jonathan Scott said:the pressure can drop to zero (almost instantaneously) without any change in the energy-momentum
What causes the pressure to drop to zero? Can it happen without anything else changing?
Consider an example: we have a star, supported against its own gravity by the pressure created by its high temperature, which is a result of nuclear reactions in its core. Then, suddenly, the nuclear reactions in the core stop. What happens? Does pressure suddenly drop to zero throughout the star? Of course not. The fact that reactions have shut down doesn't instantaneously change the pressure. The pressure is kinetic; it's due to temperature, and the temperature doesn't just go away because nuclear reactions stopped. What stopping the nuclear reactions does is to change the rate of change of temperature, from zero to some negative value. (This shows up as a change in the rate of change of energy density, since temperature is a part of the energy density.) So the temperature in the core starts dropping. This causes the pressure in the core to drop, which causes the core to start imploding. So the pressure isn't even the first thing to change.
More generally, consider some static object with a certain energy density and pressure, at some instant of time in its rest frame. Now consider the same object, one instant of time later in its rest frame, and suppose its pressure has dropped to zero. What does that mean in spacetime terms? It means we have one spacelike slice through the object, with nonzero energy density and pressure; and the next spacelike slice, adjacent to the first one, with the same energy density but zero pressure.
Now if you just look at the EFE in the object's rest frame, you are right that there is no component that directly relates the time rate of change of pressure to anything else. The time rate of change of energy is related to the spatial rate of change of momentum, and the time rate of change of momentum is related to the spatial rates of change of pressure and stress.
But the EFE is a covariant equation; it doesn't just hold in the object's rest frame, it holds in every frame. That means it must hold in a frame in which the object is moving rapidly at a constant velocity; and in that frame, the sudden drop in pressure between the two spacelike slices I described above will show up as a spatial rate of change of pressure, not just a time rate of change. But there won't be any time rate of change of momentum to correspond, since the momentum of the system in this new frame is constant. So the postulated pair of spacelike slices does violate the EFE.
Now, can you show me a case of "sudden drop in pressure with no change in energy/momentum" that does not violate the EFE in some frame, as described above?