The lecture explains the geometric basis for the recently-discovered
nonholonomic mapping principle which specifies certain laws of nature in
spacetimes with curvature and torsion from those in flat spacetime, thus
replacing and extending Einstein's equivalence principle. An important
consequence is a new action principle for determining the equation of motion of
a free spinless point particle in such spacetimes. Surprisingly, this equation
contains a torsion force, although the action involves only the metric. This
force changes geodesic into autoparallel trajectories, which are a direct
manifestation of inertia. The geometric origin of the torsion force is a
closure failure of parallelograms. The torsion force changes the covariant
conservation law of the energy-momentum tensor whose new form is derived.Comment: Corrected typos. Author Information under
http://www.physik.fu-berlin.de/~kleinert/institution.html . Paper also at
http://www.physik.fu-berlin.de/~kleinert/kleiner_re261/preprint.htm