Beyond the Einstein Addition Law and its Gyroscopic Thomas Precession: The Theory of Gyrogroups and Gyroconvector Spaces

Evidence that Einstein's addition is regulated by the Thomas precession has come to light, turning the notorious Thomas precession, previously considered the ugly duckling of special relativity theory, into the beautiful swan of gyrogroup and gyrovector space theory, where it has been extended by abstraction into an automorphism generator, called the Thomas gyration. The Thomas gyration, in turn, allows the introduction of vectors into hyperbolic geometry, where they are called gyrovectors, in such a way that Einstein's velocity additions turns out to be a gyrovector addition. Einstein's addition thus becomes a gyrocommunicative, gyroassociative gyrogroup operation in the same way that ordinary vector addition is a commutative, associative group operation. Some gyrogroups of gyrovectors admit scalar multiplication, giving rise to gyrovector spaces in the same way that some groups of vectors that admit scalar multiplication give rise to vector spaces. Furthermore, gyrovector spaces form the setting for hyperbolic geometry in the same way that vector spaces form the setting for Euclidean geometry.