Mathematical intuition behind Special and General Relativity (Udemy.com)

This was a great intro to a really tough subject for me. I have tried to read some texts on the subject, but they gloss over details. Here Emanuele not only goes into detail but even stops a lot to remind us of what the different terms are and how they relate (such as whether or not something is a tensor). He really knows the subject matter well and I would love to take some of his other courses (which I already bought).

The explanations are sometimes shorthand assuming certain prior knowledge. I had to pose and learn about Maxwell's equations for example before returning to the course. It would be easier if the sketches and equations were printed as they are hard to read in this format.

The course was good and met my expectations. SR/GR are introduced in a less formal way and thus it is quite easy to follow with advanced calculus skills. Sometimes this comes at the expense of having to follow lengthy calculations, which is not very elegant. I still prefer the course this way. There are some redundancies (of the main part with the later section, where it is presented how Einstein did it - I wonder if it is necessary to present the material both ways). Sometimes I am lacking a bit a physical interpretations of the equations (or the mathematical "intuition" behind it). I would also appreciate to learn about the "plan of the argument", before a lengthy calculation is presented. This would help better to get the idea behind it and also encourage to really follow the calculations (because you understand why it's needed). But -as said- all-in-all I am happy about the course, because I could catch the essentials of the topics - even though being out of physics for 20 years;-)

This course is being absolutely amazing! The professor provides information and derivations that I always wanted to have and in this course he gives us such information in a clear and mathematically precise way! Certainly I will follow this instructor for more courses like this. This course is comprehensive and marvelous! The content of this course went beyond my expectations! Congratulations and thank you Professor Emanulele Paresi!

The information contained in this course pushed me to seek out additional resources because of its very interesting nature. I turned to 5 separate books to supplement the material, and, I have learned an enormous amount about physics and tensors in general. My mechanical engineering background did not prepare me, but I believe this has broadened my perspective and will be useful in my job, if for no other reason.

I like the short, brief lectures. He is very thorough and wants us to understand the concepts, step-by-step, which is nice. He is a very good teacher. This is an absolutely fantastic course. He is very, very good at explaining the steps he goes through, and very methodical. I look forward to taking more classes from him! I still love the class! I was out for sometime due to a death in my family, but am glad to be back and able to spend time on this.

This course offers a lot of insight on both special and general relativity. If you are not very advanced in physics or math, the teacher develops the concepts and equations from simple arguments and builds on them. If you are more advanced, this course will provide you with a lot of intuition that might not be offered in a classroom setting. As a last year physics major that previously took GR, I am learning a lot from this course.

I really liked the format and the instructor explained everything really well. I liked the overlays that showed when there were mistakes (mistakes in lectures are a great way to highlight the more challenging math-y bits). I wish there had been a few more concrete. examples. A lot of the math that happened here was pretty abstract, and it wasn't always that easy to connect it with physical or geometric intuition. For instance, it could be nice to show why a metric with 1 + 2phi/c^2 in the 00 position acts like a Newtonian potential, or to show an explicit calculation of the Ricci scalar of a sphere or some other easily-intuited manifold.

The course could use more modern visualisation techniques as it is just the author writing equations on a piece of paper. It would also be good to have some numerical examples, at least for rank 2 tensors as the indice notation is a bit difficult to follow if you are a beginner in tensor algebra.

I love physics, and I’ve always been interested in relativity and maths. So I decided to finally learn and fully understand the math and in depth physics of relativity. Just started this course, and it’s already so great! Thank you for posting this!