Einstein's General Theory of Relativity | Lecture 5

He might have been operating with affine connections which are the negative of the ones you would normally see. However at 1:10:00 he uses the usual sign for the Christoffel Symbols. Therefore I guess Susskind made a small error. All the same he is a great lecturer.

All of my tensor calculus books state the covariant derivative of a covariant tensor has a negative sign in front of the gamma and the covariant derivative of a contravariant tensor has a positive sign. So did Susskind make a small error when he wrote down that version or am I just misunderstanding?

@ExhumedANDConsumed
So your connection coeffincents are minus his coefficients;). That doesn't change the math;)

Cheers

women understand football. they just don't see any sence in watching it.

True but my case is not against women but rather my case is that we often dismiss what we do not understand as "boring". We value what is instantaneously stimulating more than patience and learning and self discovery.

To represent the covariant or contravariant derivative, some texts use del, a semi-colon or double pipes. Example:
Va||b = del b Va = Va;b

The Christoffel symbols represent the metric connections. They are not forces since they are not tensors. They are simply scale factors for the curvature which is represented by permutations of the metric tensor.

And mathematics isn't reality either! Of course they're not THE forces.

Then why did you say that they are?
Regardless, nobody is here to wax and wane about the philosophy of mathematics and reality. This is a intro lecture series to Relativity Theory. Nothing more. Nothing less.