Leonard Susskind lectures on General Relativity

[FlyingLemons]

I love Cosmic Variance - probably one of the best (if not the best) physics blogs on the net. It always manages to post something interesting and relevant, and today they came up with something brilliant.

Leonard Susskind is one of the most brilliant scientists in the world today. Aside from being one of the founding fathers of string theory (okay, some may balk at this, but even if you don't agree with the science it has produced some good ideas), he's done great work on quark confinement and the strong nuclear force, symmetry breaking and black holes. Having once been to a seminar and seen the guy in the flesh, I can say he's a great guy.

Stanford University has stuck up a series of videos of Susskind's lecture course on General Relativity. I've only just started watching it and although I haven't really seen much, if it's like the seminar then it's worth it. I'm not entirely sure yet if it's a popular, general audience course though, or something more technical...

 

[Shaw]

I posted about his courses about 6 weeks ago (here) and you responded (here).

So how is this new for you? I thought you would have watched all of them by now.

 

[FlyingLemons]

Ah... I see sometimes I have a short memory for things.

My memory was jogged by Cosmic Variance, and I'd forgotten about the Susskind courses for a while.

 

[Ronald Held]

How technical are they?

 

[Shaw]

It gets pretty technical. Susskind goes through the effort of developing a number of elements of differential geometry that are needed. I skipped over those parts as it is usually painful to watch physicists do this type of thing (and this was no exception).

I'm not sure how successful he was in conveying the concepts as he still had audience members who were confusing vector (parallel) transport with movement of vectors along geodesics. There is something to be said for using Levi-Civita's original concept of vector transport (via the use of developable surfaces) before jumping in to the tensor laden mathematical techniques which tend to hide the geometry of what is actually happening.

But it is something of a condensed course and he expects the viewers (even online) to either have seen the earlier courses in the series or already have a familiarity with the material covered in them. The previous course was on Special Relativity and also touched on field theories, so at the very least I would think they should be watched together.

I only have one lecture to go (of those released so far on iTunes, it hasn't made it to YouTube yet) of the next course covering aspects of Cosmology. I assume the final course (of the six) will be on String Theory or the like.

 

[Ronald Held]

Can I download them in a WMV format or QT? I do not have an Itunes account(or an Iphone or Ipod).

 

[Shaw]

You should be able to download them from iTunes without an account... they are free, DRM-free, MPEG4 (.m4v) files. I play mine in iTunes, but they play just as well in Quicktime (I don't have a video capable iPod or iPhone either). I believe everything at iTunes U is supposed to be free for anyone to download, and other schools (like MIT) use the more standard MPEG4 format (.mp4) for their lectures.

I'll look around for a more direct method of getting the videos (other than converting the YouTube FLV files)... sadly Stanford doesn't have a self contain site like MIT's OCW site, but I got the feeling from the comments of one professor on one Stanford lecture that they are directly competing with MIT in this area so something like that might not be too far away.

 

[Ronald Held]

Shaw, I will try to download and find the time to watch the files. Thanks