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It's a cognitive gap, apparently. The Craig. T. Nelson problem. Granted, he's only a millionnaire, so maybe that doesn't count.

(with thanks to new member @Doogles31731 for sending this)

Correct - but with the caveat that the concept of ‘gravitational potential’ can only be meaningfully defined in certain highly symmetric spacetimes, such as Schwarzschild. It is not a generally applicable concept. Indeed. It vanishes locally in those regions, but not globally. Yes, correct. Think back to your math lessons in high school - remember how you drew simple graphs such as y=x^2. No question that the graph is globally curved. But now imagine you were to choose some point (eg x=2), and zoom into the graph there. What happens? The more you zoom in, the flatter it will begin to look. It’s just like that. This takes a while to really get your head around. I’m sorry I won’t try to offer a proper answer here, as typing LaTeX code on an on-screen phone keyboard is just too cumbersome and time consuming. What I will say though is don’t focus on the components, but on what objects you pass to the tensor, and what you get out as a result. Rough outline: Imagine you have two test particles, whose world lines are initially parallel. Now choose a point on one of these world lines - take the unit tangent vector at that point (which is physically just that particle’s 4-velocity). Then, still at that same point, take the perpendicular separation vector that connects it to the other particle’s world line. Now imagine the Riemann tensor as a machine with four slots (the four indices). Input the tangent vector into slots 2 & 4, and the separation vector into slot 3; leave the first slot empty. The output of the machine then is a new vector (because we left one index open) - it tells you how fast the separation between the test particles begins to change, and in what direction (relative acceleration between the test particles). Writing this down in math notation immediately gives you the geodesic deviation equation, bearing in mind that we need to use a covariant, not ordinary, second derivative. So the Riemann tensor is a machine that takes the tangent vector on one world line, and the separation vector between them as input; and produces as a result an acceleration vector that tells you how that separation between particles changes over time (geodesic deviation). This deviation can be a combination of any space and time direction, and can be complicated - you can get the world lines twisting around one another in a helix configuration, and all kinds of fancy stuff like that. This is really most of what there is to it in a GR context - Riemann has other uses as well (eg one can calculate tidal forces from it), but I won’t get into this here. It does in fact reflect all possible degrees of freedom of gravity. The individual components of the tensor represent tidal effects between various combinations of directions, but I really don’t think it’s helpful to try to look at it this way - it won’t help you understand. Better to think of it as a machine with slots that take an input, and produces an output; with the indices of the tensor being those slots. Any tensor can be conceptualised in that way - eg the Ricci tensor takes a future-pointing time-like unit vector into both slots, and produces a real number that is the rate at which a small volume changes when in free fall. In vacuum R(u,v)=0, so in vacuum a small volume in free fall is conserved (but its shape will get distorted, which is described by a different tensor). Inside a matter distribution, neither volume nor shape would be preserved. (Note carefully that this geometric interpretation only holds so long as there is no expansion, shear, or vorticity, which is true for most simple spacetimes) Hopefully this makes any kind of sense to you.

It's an obsession that is more akin to a religious obsession I suggest, in spamming his propaganda/philosophy, and ignoring the prime issue and question at hand. jealousy?? envy?? or a political obsession?

In a weird way, Peterkin is trollish, but in a way that’s polite enough to avoid banning, but who simultaneously hijacks and needlessly spins wheels in nearly every thread he joins. High post count, low post quality… net drain instead of net add in discussions #shotsfired #meta

I didn't count them, but I know "filthy" isn't one I generally employ, as I don't consider t a term of endearment, and I have an unsubstantiated suspicion they don't, either. Why do you think I should be complimentary about the super rich? I am failing to take comfort from that. Indeed I did. He paid for all the seats. He is doing it for a hospital, which is very nice - but not a pre-requisite for space jaunts. No, there are lots, not heavily used. But that's the SpaceX is launching from. They're where I left them. Read as you please.

A very insightful comment, without any need to refer to index notation. +1

No, this one is new to me. Thanks for bringing it up. Having skimmed through the link, my first impression is that this formalism is not nearly as elegant and intuitive as the standard one (and full equivalence with GR is yet to be shown). I kind of fail to see the advantage, though the point about substructure is interesting. See studiot’s comments on intrinsic vs extrinsic to begin with. Furthermore, there is not really any force involved in gravity - when you have initially parallel test particles in free fall, and attach an accelerometer to them, it will always read exactly zero, so no forces; nonetheless in the presence of gravity their geodesics will begin to deviate. Good question! This point is a bit subtle, and really the answer should be “both of the above, depending on context”. The physical manifestation of curvature is geodesic deviation - meaning that initially parallel world lines will begin to deviate as they extend into the future. It is thus necessary for world lines to have at least some extension in spacetime before “parallel” and “deviate” even make sense - you can’t speak of parallelism at a single event. Thus curvature has measurable meaning only across some distance. I’m highlighting the word ‘measurable’ because counterintuitively the mathematical object describing curvature (Riemann tensor) nonetheless is a local object, like all tensors. For clarification on this point, refer back to the example about calculus in my previous post. However, there are also scenarios where the effects of gravity are in some sense ‘relative’. Consider a hollow shell of matter, like a planet that has somehow been hollowed out (not very physical of course, but I’m just demonstrating a principle here). Birkhoffs Theorem tells us that spacetime everywhere in the interior cavity is perfectly flat, ie locally Minkowski. There’s no geodesic deviation inside the cavity. Now let’s place a clock into the cavity, and another reference clock very far way on the outside, so both clocks are locally in flat Minkowski spacetime. What happens? Even though both clocks are locally in flat spacetime (no gravity), the one inside the cavity is still gravitationally dilated with respect to the far way one! This is because while both local patches are flat, spacetime in between them is curved - if you were to draw an embedding diagram, you’d get a gravitational well with a ‘Mesa mountain’ at the bottom; and the flat top of that mountain sits at a lower level than the far away clock, thus the time dilation. So in this particular case one could reasonably say that gravitation effects are ‘relative’ between local patches. Or you can put it like this: both regions are Minkowski, but one is more Minkowski than the other The isn’t very intuitive, but mathematically perfectly consistent - if you look at the world lines of the clocks, you’ll find that while they appear parallel in space (they’re simply at rest wrt to one another), they deviate in spacetime. In GR it is crucially important that one fully understands local vs global, or else there’ll be no end to misunderstandings and problems. This point is where most, if not all, apparent ‘paradoxes’ in GR arise. In general, no, it’s not a scalar - it’s a rank-4 tensor field, the Riemann tensor. However, you can choose to look at only certain aspects of curvature, such as how volumes change (rank-2 Ricci tensor), or how areas differ from Euclidean counterparts (rank-0 Ricci scalar), or the average Gaussian curvature of a small region of space (rank-2 Einstein tensor). But to capture all aspects, you need the full rank-4 tensor with 20 independent components. Tensors are not invariant, but covariant - meaning their individual components do vary in just the right ways so that the relationships between the components remain, hence the overall object is the same for all observers. Remember a tensor is all about the relationships between its components.