Status Updates From Einstein Gravity in a Nutshell

I may have to surrender on this one. I was doing well for a while, but taking a break was not a good idea, it's nearly impossible to jump back in and know what anything is anymore, as everything builds progressively.

I might just have to abandon this and return when I can also sit down and take notes and work through this with some rigor.

Finally picking this up again. I'm going to try not to worry too much about totally absorbing the math for now and just get through it, then I can make a second pass and actually do the exercises and such.

I find the style of Zee's writing more lively and entertaining than most textbooks. Having fun so far!

Finished the first section. I have a feeling I'll need to go back to it again in the future. I actually understood the idea of covariant derivatives quite easily, it's just the indexing and notation that is making my head spin, especially with introducing dummy variables and such all willy nilly without warning. Side note: I despise using Greek letters like Zeta and Xi, they just look like identical squiggles.

1.6 kicked my ass, I may need to revisit that more slowly.

This should count as at least 5 books. It's going to be slow-going, as I need to stop here and go over some of the exercises. I feel like my conceptualization of tensors is much stronger now, but I need to be absolutely certain. This kicks the ass of anything presented by Baarmand, who stuck to the rigid Euler angles approach instead of a more rigorous formalism.

Part of the reason why I usually prefer physicists to mathematicians, is that apart from the fact that physicists often try to appeal to intuition rather than caked and dry logical arguments, the physicist rarely condescends. The mathematician believes that definitions and proofs alone are enough to conjure up the right idea, whereas the physicists doesn't stop unless they themselves can 'see' it.

Happy to review this. So far, quite good. Like Zee's style. Knows where all the stumbling blocks are and eliminates them.

Images are non-rigorous, as much as they may be the life-blood, the very stuff of mathematics. But we introduce rules, logic, and generalisation in order to utilise our images more precisely. But not only that. Another observation is that having an archive of 'rigorous images' or mathematical facts is the basis of advancing proofs at later on. Rigour is good for 'equating' very different notions of images, motifs.

While not entirely related to the book, in trying to work out an unproved but trivial statement in one of the chapters I was browsing, I felt it necessary to articulate a rather banal but important insight one gains into what math is when one actually tries to do math: whereas 'images' are satisfactory for reasoning about most facts of daily life, in certain situations rigour becomes important.