LISA Gravity Course

Ha ! Well spotted. Doctors sleep when they are dead ..... :-):-)

It looks to be a massive compression of the highlights of The Relativities. I agree it will be a curious thing to see how many can 'hang on ' to the ride ! :-)

I'm happy to answer any related questions here if it becomes problematic to get one at their site.

Cheers, Mike.

The discussions are a tad loose from some. To be expected. Alas metaphysical intuition doesn't get the grass cut in The Relativities. It's certainly not my gig over there so I say my piece and leave it be. My slapping hand has been a wee bit itchy, the thread nesting is limited to two levels, plus one is restrained by 1200 characters. Hence I have to make the time to make it short { Hello Mr Irony }. Sigh ... saves me from Keyboard Warrior Tendinitis I 'spose ... click, ergo sum .... :-):-)

Cheers, Mike.

I'll keep going in pace with the schedule and see how it winds out.

But so far I suspect you are probably correct. They call it MOOC : Massive Online something something. I think the 'OC' may well evolve to Overwhelming Confusion* in this instance. Ought be good for the BS bluffers, give them some snappy ammo for their other online pseudo-wrangles, give them a fake intellectual high ground to throw stuff from, feeling clever etc as you say. I have just received an email asking me to nominate a "Learning Hero" ie. another contributor ( not a author/assistant of the course ) whom I think is worthy. Trouble is that it just validates the concept that group think/agreement is the standard for science. Oooh I like that ( & so does Fred ) so it must be right. Indeed browsing through : many of the highly liked responses are absolute twaddle.

What essentially happens in genuine scientific debates is examination of how well given theories match physical results as obtained. Disagreement amongst scientists is about the closeness of the matching and likewise merit. That is all too frequently viewed as a philsophical problem - engaging all manner of extraneous baggage - and not a pragmatic one. Is the ruler that we measure reality with any good ?

I am sounding elitist but GR is not a topic that yields to easy compression without discarding key essences. Personally I think it is a bloody hard topic in my experience. It is an extension of perspective well out of ordinary experience and much otherwise hopeful analogy will fail. Some mathematics is necessary in my view for proper understanding. While SR has fairly straight forward algebra, GR requires tensors. So you're into tertiary level maths from the get-go there. I have found it is best to learn the math alongside the relevant physical theory. { I am about quarter way through the 'bible' : Gravitation by Meisner/Thorne/Wheeler .... }

Cheers, Mike.

* Quite worryingly one of the assistant/mentors was assigning mass to photons ! The construct was that while photons have no rest mass they do have a relativistic one ! Awkward phrasing and bound to cause trouble for neophytes. While one can take Energy and divide by c^2 for anything of interest, calling that 'mass' for a photon is going to lead to a high-grade semantic conflict elsewhere in the topic. Better to say that all forms of energy gravitate ( the right hand side of Einstein's GR equation ) and some of those forms have a rest frame to which one can assign a rest mass, and by extension a relativistic mass as viewed from other frames.