Why me?

Heres an email I recently received from my professor about the final exam:



So far in Relativity we have covered the 4-vector notation (104-105),
and most of the concepts in the space-time section (118-122).
This week I'll review a little about the Energy-Momentum vector and
4-vector scalar products to tidy up what we discussed in the tutorial.
However, I will mostly concentrate on the postulates of relativity and
the Lorentz transformations (106-113).

I think that the material actually presented in the problems and
solutions is correct (though I don't remember exactly what I meant by
the last sentence on Page 2 of the Tutorial solution), but the
relationship between the Laplacian (grad^2) and the metric is more
complex than I implied in the tutorial. So deriving eta_ij from ds^2 is
fine, but it would be best to use the relationship eta^ij eta_jk=
delta^i_k to derive eta^ij. And even once you've done that you need a
more complicated formula to generate the Laplacian from the metric
tensor. This will be explained in the General Relativity course...

In summary, the main take-home message is that there are non-trivial
metrics in curvilinear coordinates and unavoidable negative signs in the
metric when you start doing Lorentz transformations. In General
Relativity it become even more complex, but that's a matter for another
course...

Best Wishes,
Mike Reid


If you understand half the words he said, please take my final for me. Because I did not.