- #1
pierce15
- 315
- 2
Hello,
I'm reading Sean Carroll's Spacetime and Geometry. When discussing dual vectors, he presents the gradient as the "simplest example of a dual vector" in spacetime. This confuses me because I learned the gradient to be an operator which takes a scalar as input and outputs a vector. The way Carroll presented dual vectors, it seemed that they should do the opposite: take a vector as input and output a scalar. Can someone clear this up for me?
I'm reading Sean Carroll's Spacetime and Geometry. When discussing dual vectors, he presents the gradient as the "simplest example of a dual vector" in spacetime. This confuses me because I learned the gradient to be an operator which takes a scalar as input and outputs a vector. The way Carroll presented dual vectors, it seemed that they should do the opposite: take a vector as input and output a scalar. Can someone clear this up for me?