pmb_phy
- 2,950
- 1
Please feel free to PM me at anytime if you are irritated by something I've posted. In such cases it is highly likely there is miscommunication between us which is better resolved in PM so we don't mess the board up.pervect said:OK, I'm feeling a little calmer, now.
These are two different entities which have a one-to-one correspondence between the two. One is a 4-vector (contravariant vector) which lies in the tangent space and is normally called the energy-momentum four vector. The other is a 1-form (covariant vector) which lies in the cotanget space. 1-forms and 4-vectors are different animals and no corresponence exists without a metric. I don't know of any notation which makes this distinction other than the abstract index notation. Are you familiar with this? Wald uses it amlost exclusively.OK, here you start to lose me. In particular, I've never seen anyone demand that any tensor quantity only be subscripted or superscripted.
Here it will be useful for me in this post to let P = 4-momentum and let q be the 1-form which is the dual to P. Then q0 is the particle's energy.
Same with tensors of higher rank. e.g. T could be a covariant tensor of rank 2. That means that it maps vectors to real numbers. But the T notation does not tell you what kind of animal the tensor is. It can't tell you if its a tensor which maps 1-forms to reals. But when there is a metric there is a one-to-one correspondence between the covariant tensors and the contravariant tensors then we can forget about the distinction. But we can't forget about the physical meaning, especially in the present example.
Do you know why P0 is referred to as the energy of the particle and P0 is not? Its because P0 has the properties one expects of energy, namely that in a time independant g-field the energy of the particle is a constant of motion. P0 does not have this property.You'll have to do a lot more convincing if you want me to believe that there is only "one true way" to represent energy. In fact, now that I think about it, you'll have to do a heck of a lot of convicing. One of the main features of tensors is that one can use covariant or contravariant indices, at will.
Okay.Your statement above fails to convince me otherwise.
Am I 100% positive about this? No. Just 90% positive. But when Schutz and others goes out of their way to refer to P0 as energy then I listen very carefully. Could they be wrong or could I misunderstand them? Sure. Of course. I can't seem to determine literature wide how energy is defined in GR especially since nobody ever really defines it in general. But as I said, I will only know everything about 1 year after I pass away.

Pete
Last edited: