Changes

: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.

: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 ''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)

: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)