We have yet to meet the star of the show. There is one object that we can place on a manifold whose importance dwarfs all others, at least when it comes to understanding gravity. This is the metric.

The existence of a metric brings a whole host of new concepts to the table which, collectively, are called Riemannian geometry. In fact, strictly speaking we will need a slightly different kind of metric for our study of gravity, one which, like the Minkowski metric, has some strange minus signs. This is referred to as Lorentzian Geometry and a slightly better name for this section would be “Introducing Riemannian and Lorentzian Geometry”. However, for our immediate purposes the differences are minor. The novelties of Lorentzian geometry will become more pronounced later in the course when we explore some of the physical consequences such as horizons.

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正文:英文 · OCR 机器稿 · 待校对

核对状态:OCR 机器稿 · 待校对

原书 PDF

来源版本:michaelmas-2019-source-20260923

来源 PDF SHA-256:3ba65dc61f22a69c7d5fdf3e8e1f641efbfa6cf49a44b3dcb0fd5367ba9fcf1c

OCR 来源 SHA-256:4489f366864dc6e3f68337328d72571d937e8794fa6c9c377869436e2ed366c5

OCR 产物 SHA-256:c4e01252bbb0d3dc4a663bfbfc221b0029b61d2805a204fb58353391b762b65f