Scott’s Reviews > Einstein Gravity in a Nutshell > Status Update

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.

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.

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.