Lec 02. Einstein's General Relativity and Gravitation: Special Relativity 1

UCI Physics 255 Einstein's General Relativity and Gravitation (Spring 2014)
Lec 02. Einstein's General Relativity and Gravitation -- Special Relativity -- Part 1
Instructor: Herbert Hamber, Ph.D.

License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA

Description: "Einstein's General Relativity and Gravitation" is taught at UCI as Physics 255. Topics covered: Lorentz Transformations, Euclidean vs. Lorentzian Signature, Proper time. Flat metric, Time dilation, Energy and Momentum, Four-force and Relativistic
Equations of Motion.

Recorded April 3, 2014.

[aaronjohnson]

I liked this explanation very much, and I found it helpful to understand how I can apply quaternions to the Ricci curvature scalar of a Minkowski spacetime manifold. A mathematically rigorous proof like this is a nice basis for understanding the Einstein Field equations for General Relativity. Thanks for sharing, Dr. Hamber!

I'm new to Special relativity and now I know how to prioritize my reading list by seeing how Einstein applied Lorentz's work to General Relativity and how it subsequently led him to come up with Special Relativity.

[ellenetdesign]

Excellent lecture, but only one question - although I know its important in Tensor calculus - is why we are summing over with vectors? 

[gizmo]

Very rigorous. Hands up! 🙏🙏🙏👍👍👍
(Not for beginners, though...).

[ikarienator]

Interestingly, the lecturer sometimes put 0th index after 1, 2, and 3, as when he writes down the matrix form of Lorentz transform and 4-vectors, then sometimes he writes down 0th index before 1, 2, and 3, as when we writes down the metrics tensor. I've never seen anyone put the 0th after the 3rd.

[zeromodz]

Honestly, I give this guy credit for talking about such complicated subjects. But, he really does suck at explaining this stuff. I don't know if he has time constraints, but he talks wyy too fast for anyone who seriously wants to learn this stuff for the first time.

[darlove]

Very poor exposition. Obscure to say the least. Seen much better.