Recent content by Alabran

Bummer I wasn't able to talk near as much as I wanted to. A firedrill cut into 15 of my 50 minutes. I think I was able to get the concept across pretty well, I made a cool little simulator of space-time fabric (a stretched sheet with a globe and several ball-bearings.) I was able to get across...

Shoot. Well, I've abandonned attempting a mathmatical understanding of them, certaintly. Still, since Baez used the term within the article http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/gr/gr.html" , I thought I should have an idea about what the Ricci Tensor really was, or at least what it represented...

Precisely. www.webassign.com Not so bad of a website, but every now and then you find problems with answers like that one. You're confidant you have the right answer, but it's wrong and it's not going to tell you why. On the other hand, sometimes there are multiple choice questions with...

I imagine the third side of said triangle is the length between both of the vectors. That said, this seems to be a tricky problem because of the three dimensions involved, I'm thinking about it now.

I don't know if you see this or not, but integration is a very important part of this problem. I am not very strong in this matter, but from what you expressed, neither equation you are using would do the trick. Edit: Ok, I just noticed the "kinda like a crescent" part. I imagine I would use...

I finally found the reason why I kept getting it wrong... The work due to friction is, of course, negative.

I had thought, taking the equation T=\frac{T_0}{\sqrt{1 - v^2/c^2}} one could multiply said equation by the denominator and result in T \sqrt{1-v^2/c^2} = T_0. Since T_0 is the time the trolley would observe and T is the time the outside observer would observe, it would seem that if the velocity...

woops Ok, back on topic. So, I'm following http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/gr/oz1.html" . I've reached the Ricci Tensor (the explanation, of which, is pretty mind boggling. I love this stuff.) and I can speculate on the meaning of the meaning of the Weyl Tensor, though I haven't actually...

From my very limited understanding of the subject, seems that the period of 1 hour, as seen by the outside observer, will take no time whatsoever for the person in the trolley. So, say the trolley moved at c in the opposite direction for an infinitismilly small amount of time and the person on...

Oh, I understand this. As funny as this sounds, I noticed this in second grade, though I never thought of it as being a representation of extra-dimensional space, I was very interested in three-dimensional illustration at the time and, familiar with the foreshortening effects of perspective...

I just made a 270 degree triangle on a basketball. Exciting!

Thank you all for your help, this has been very illuminating. While we're all familiar with gaussian surfaces through it's use in finding electric and magnetic flux, I doubt any of us understood it at this level. I just returned from dinner in consideration on how to make a 270 degree...

"Let me describe the Ricci scalar, R, in 2d. This is positive at a given point if the surface looks locally like a sphere or ellipsoid there, and negative if it looks like a hyperboloid - or "saddle". If the R is positive at a point, the angles of a small triangle there made out of geodesics add...

Very well then, I'll look over this Baez & Bunn article and Baez's "general relativity tutorial" looks amusing. Do you recommend any place to start within your own list of tutorials?

Just saw these last three posts... I understand that the mathematics of General Relativity is incredibly advanced for my level. Unfortunately, some grasp of the mathematics is required as par the project. This may be irrational (and my professor is certaintly notorious for that) but that's...