Chrononautic Log: It’s not rocket science or even brain surgery, but...

It’s not rocket science or even brain surgery, but...

5 o'clock, June 14, 2004

So, help me out here: What’s the quickest way (with minimal disruption to my day-to-day life; one or two distance-learning or night classes at a time, say) for me to get from point A — three semesters of calculus and one college-level introductory physics class, taken nearly fifteen years ago — to B — being able to follow the math in journals like Classical and Quantum Gravity?

The straightforward way to do this would be to spend the next few years taking about a dozen or twenty college courses starting with single-variable calculus (again) and moving up to differential geometry, with excursions along the way into topology and partial differential equations — not to mention some actual physics.

Unfortunately, even the straightforward way isn’t that straightforward, since no one institution (that I can find) offers everything I’d want to take as a distance learning course or even as an on-campus continuing education course. It could be that the only real way to do it is to drop out of the work force again and spend five or six years getting a Master’s in math or physics; and I’m not sure I want it that badly.

Anyone got any better ideas?

You could just do what I do when I read academic journals...skip over most of the equations. If the author is a decent writer, you'll still get the gist. If it's *mostly* math, then you're screwed.

The question is: Why do you want to understand the math (as opposed to say, specialized, in-depth knowledge in some other field)?

In many physics departments, courses dealing with classical and quantum gravity are electives for the Ph.D. students specializing in those fields. I know I wasn't required to take any such course.

The seminal textbook for gravity is Gravitation by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler. We call it the "Black Death". I use it to frighten my non-major students who complain about having to do basic algebra.

And remember, you can always contact your local physics content expert. :)

Lisa, I’ll take a look at the Black Death. I have a feeling, though, that without the structure of a formal course, I probably won’t have the patience to work through the problem sets. :) (At least, that’s what’s happened with my orbital mechanics textbooks.)

There’s also my friend Malcolm, the cosmologist. It’s just that when I ask him a question I can usually only understand about half of the answer. :)

Have to love the Amazon reviews of the Black Death: “If you look very carefully, you can see gravitational lensing effects round the edge of this book, and it does tend to suck in all objects within a ten meter radius and compact them down to a singularity, but I have to say that in my time dabbling in it I haven't once opened it on a page where I didn't learn something new and/or gain a new insight . . .”

Still, looks like I need to, at minimum, brush up on my multivariable calculus first.

Chrononautic Log

It’s not rocket science or even brain surgery, but...

5 o'clock, June 14, 2004

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