I discovered Leonard Susskind because of the book "The black hole war". It was interesting and funny and the fact I was not able to grasp the last part of it -that holographic metaphore is disturbing-, didn't make me dislike it at all. I started to look at physicists more like human beings thanks to it. And that's saying a lot.
Before that, my only contact with physicists were close related hate-filled-relationships due to the fact engineering physics in Spain -the time I studied it, at least- were intended more to make an IQ selection than teaching actual interesting physics. I can blame no one for that. It's a consequence -one of the bad ones- of having a public university model. Good ones outnumbered bad ones, by the way. In the future, who knows.
Leonard Susskind a couple of years ago. From Stanford web.
I was surprised when, after reading the book, I was looking for GR info online and I discovered a lecture from the man himself at Stanford. I was not very impressed for the lecture at the beginning -it was not very detailed because it was embedded in a general physics course-, but I decided to look for more.
So, I just found a couple of days ago there are 6 lectures -from October and November 2012- which treat the topic and, you can picture the rest out. I must warn the fact the man is not a monster doesn't make his lectures full of fun, ok? Be patient at least, and skip only necessary parts. You'll find interesting how he just clarifies a lot of math involved from a practical view. He can be a little boring in some parts -each lecture is from 1 hour 40 minutes to 2 hours-, but he deserves the time, specially if like me, you're looking for extra sources of info and other views on the subject.
There are only a couple of annoying things in the lectures:
- Some of his students tend to make really bizarre and out of place questions. Folks, please, fix your sh*t together. You are at Stanford.
- In some of the lectures Susskind eats in class something which looks like cookies, drinks coffe, and he never, never, never, ever, cap his marker. Sorry, I had to say it, I had to -well to be fair, actually I've seen him putting the cap on a couple of times... In a total time of 10 hours...
Lecture 1: Introduction to GR
This is the lecture you should have if you are completely new to GR. The first part is about how classical and Special Relavity leads to somewhere else. The second part -about 30 minutes before the end-, prof. Susskind introduces several Math tools like covariant derivatives and rules of the thumb to operate with tensors. Not in detail, but a very good approach.
Lecture 2: Proper notation and Math tools.
This is the MUST SEE if you are really into spacetime Math. Tensor algebra and some basics in differential geometry are reviewed. But let me play the father: knowing it exists, doesn't make you an expert. If you want to grasp these concepts you have to play with them. I'm preparing a book reviewing if you want to do some more Math than just listening. It will save no one, but it will help. I guess...
Lecture 3: Riemann curvature tensor.
Math just got real, people. The class starts with a "computers do it better", so why bother? Well, I'll get into numerical relativity later -I hope- but, free advice: every numerical computer application requires you not to be a monkey. If computer spits out sh*t, you are supossed to identify it in order not to eat it. If you want to program the computer too, you'll need this harder.
So, the class starts easy and gets into with interesting things like covariant derivative by minute 60. Things turn nasty about 15 minutes before the end, where I can follow the logic, but not the concepts. The thing is he formulates the Riemann curvature tensor in a general form and gives hints about why this formulation is that way.
Lecture 4: Basic metrics and implications
Here is showed interesting implications of metrics in flat spacetime, and some mathematical tools to grasp it. A funny thing at the end is he shows, mathematically, a curvature in spacetime has similar mathematical form to an accelerated reference frame in a flat spacetime. That looks like the principle of equivalence in mathematical manner. Cool. Believe me. It's cool.
Lecture 5: Spacetime metric.
In this lecture, prof. Susskind derives a metric and gives and example of using an Euler-Lagrange formulation to do so. By the end, Schwarzschild's metric is introduced. I haven't been able to study in detail this lecture, but I'll get harder into it when I try to derive Schwarzschild's metric by myself.
Lecture 6: Black Holes.
Black holes are explained from the already derived Schwarzschild's metric. I find this not very interesting -for the moment, I have other things in mind-, but for Susskind it is for important reasons which are related to his field of research. Black holes are not just cool because thery're like the ultimate force in nature, but for the challenge they mean to understand the universe. Read his book and you'll understand.
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