On the viability of the Palatini form of 1/ R gravity

Recently Flanagan astro-ph/0308111 has argued that the Palatini form of 1/R gravity is ruled out by experiments such as electron-electron scattering. His argument involves adding minimally coupled fermions in the Jordan frame and transforming to the Einstein frame. This produces additional terms that are ruled out experimentally. Here I argue that this conclusion is false. It is well known that conformally related theories are mathematically equivalent but not physically equivalent. As discussed by Magnano and Sokolowski 2 one must decide, in the vacuum theory, which frame is the physical frame and add the minimally coupled Lagrangian in this frame. If this procedure is followed the resulting theory is not ruled out experimentally. The discussions in this paper also show that the equivalence between the generalized gravitational theories and scalar tensor theories discussed by Flanagan gr-qc/0309015 is only mathematical, not physical.