X, Y and Z Coordinates in General Relativity

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In general relativity it's very important to distinguish the physically real things from the coordinate artifacts. There are no natural coordinates to use, so you can think that something is natural and telling you something is real, but it's really not. Why are those mues and nues appearing over and over again? Because they are indices in space time, not in space. Then Einstein's equation is expressed as r mu nu minus one half which equals eight pi g t mu nu.

My little pandemic-lockdown contribution to the world was a series of videos called The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. The idea was to explain physics in a pedagogical way, concentrating on established ideas rather than speculations, with the twist that I tried to include and explain any equations that seemed useful, even though no prior mathematical knowledge was presumed. I’m in the process of writing a series of three books inspired by those videos, and the first one is coming out now: The Biggest Ideas In The Universe: Space, Time, and Motion. For this solo episode I go through one of the highlights from the book: explaining the mathematical and physical basis of Einstein’s equation of general relativity, relating mass and energy to the curvature of spacetime. Hope it works!

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