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from the I-can-really-learn-my-maths-and-sciences-now dept.
If you ever wanted to learn General Relativity, now here's your chance. The caveat is that first you must learn differential geometry. But it's not difficult, really. Only lots of hard work, but not difficult. I was attending this February such a course. This course is fully documented: there are recordings of all lectures, and of tutorials with solutions (also the .pdf files with practice questions). For easier access you can also visit the The WE-Heraeus International Winter School on Gravity and Light YouTube channel.
You should know though that this material on the internet is not everything we were doing there, the biggest omission are the advanced tutorials, which were done in groups and couldn't be filmed. Also their solutions were too difficult to be "quickly" filmed like the tutorials that have videos. However there's hope that advanced tutorials will also be put online some time later this year (as promised by the organizers). In that case I'll submit a follow up story.
I must tell you that attending this course was really a great experience, and Prof. F. P. Schuller is in fact on of the best lecturers I have ever met.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday April 07 2015, @09:27PM
Well, isn't there a theorem that any curved space can be faithfully embedded i a space f sufficiently higher dimension, at least locally?
I found it hard to get that it was a 3+1 metric, where some of the directions effectively contribute negatively to distance.
-- hendrik
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday April 08 2015, @06:24PM
Yes, but Differential Geometry is supposed to be about how that n+1 dimensional space isn't necessary. But talking about bending or curving is just the wrong way to explain that (to me). Instead the analogy should be to compression and rarefaction, as in sound waves. THAT I'd have had (I think) little difficulty in grasping.
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