Episode 136: Introduction to General Relativity
The Science of Everything Podcast
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The Metric Tensor in General Relativity
The metric tensor is pretty much the central object in general relativity when it comes to the curvature of space time. It's a four by four matrix essentially because it describes the amount that each dimension kind of bends in or affects or interacts with all of the other dimensions. The whole universe now you might be thinking how can you possibly describe the shape of four dimensional space time the whole universe with just ten numbers in our metric tensor? Well there's a few ways to answer this depending on the way you look at it one way to look at it is well you can't really and so anything that we do is really just going to be a very crude approximation of the general overall shape.
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