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/* Idea for presenting this */
:By luck (whether good or bad is left as an exercise for the reader) that's pretty much the curriculum for the first six weeks of my intro to general relativity course. I mean beat for beat: we start out reviewing special relativity and transformations from orthonormal coordinates to oblique coordinates, which takes us into the hyperbolic trig interpretation, then we do curvilinear coordinates and the equivalence principle. I use the unit 2-sphere and tidal forces to introduce the concept of an obstruction, which gets us into the metric and parallel transport. That's usually when I say, "Okay, just assume everything I'm about to tell you is true and trust me," and I do a couple hours of tensor algebra so we can talk Riemann.
:I'm ''not'' a good candidate to boil all that down into something suitable for a precocious high-schooler. That's why I used the same story I told my niece when she asked me what I do for a living. Except we actually went out to the back yard trampoline with a tennis ball. (Her adorable and patient aunt played the part of the sun in our little model solar system.)
:I'm all for putting it in terms of geometry rather than balls and surfaces, if you think you can explain it in a way that gives a good intuitive grasp of the ideas. --[[User:KSorenson|KSorenson]] 16:29, 14 November 2009 (EST) :Oh, also I'm going to move your advanced-math-ahead warning sign down to the quantitative section and replace the some-math-ahead warning sign. --[[User:KSorenson|KSorenson]] 16:30, 14 November 2009 (EST)
