Special Relativity: Four-Vectors and Covariance

What is a vector? The lecture motivates the promotion from the group of rotations to the Lorentz group and discusses coordinates of an event as a 4-vector (contravariant and covariant), Lorentz transformations in matrix form, the definition of a 4-vector, Lorentz scalars, time and space-like parts and the metric tensor, determinant of a Lorentz transformation matrix, four connected components of the Lorentz group, the concept of covariance, 4-gradient, 4-velocity, and 4-acceleration.

This lecture is part of a series recorded by Professor Kirill Belashchenko for a graduate course on electrodynamics that was taught at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in the flipped-classroom format. Complementary tutorials are available at https://physics.unl.edu/belashchenko/....

This lecture is licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 International License:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b...