﻿I’ll take a different approach here and start by talking about education, and being a pirate scientist. What does being a pirate scientist mean? I think it means having the capabilities and critical thinking necessary to immerse yourself in whatever technical academic field you choose. In my case this is exemplified through my desire to understand spacetime and general relativity from first principles. But my goal is larger than that. My goal is to be able to observe any part of academia as an outsider, where I can critically comment on anything that comes up, perhaps coming up with a unique insight that might lead to a discovery that’s responsible for a large positive impact in the world.


God damnit is this goal hard. It’s lonely, and difficult, and you feel stuck a lot of the time, like you're not making progress. It’s also a really hard decision to make, to go down this path. Because it’s very easy to drink from the cup of mediocrity. So goddamn appealing.


I was talking to Tanisha today, and she also wants to reach a similar point to me.


Who else is a pirate scientist? Who are the pirate scientists of the world? I want to meet them, and create an environment with them.


One thing I felt is that alone, it’s hard to start a movement. For example, I’d want to get funding for myself and pitch myself. But it’s hard. However, if Tanisha and I were working together, then maybe it could work. At least I would feel a lot less lonely trying.


The only other person I know who’s a pirate scientist is Sebastien. Full pirate scientist mode, no distractions at all.


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Ok let me do some math.


One thing that has been confusing me is the decomposition of tangent vectors, cotangent vectors, and more generally tensors into their chart induced components. For example in the Newton spacetime lecture, we talk about encoding gravity into the structure of spacetime, which essentially means relating Newton's second law + the gravity equation to get the relation that acceleration and force are proportional (in a purely gravitational situation with no other forces). This was famously shown when the astronauts dropped a feather and a hammer on the moon, and both fell at the same speed.


The point is that when asking the question “can you encode gravity in space”, the answer is no because when you expand the force acceleration equation, it turns out that this equation cannot be expressed as an autoparrelel equation. But the part I find confusing is that I don’t quite remember how to expand into specific charts, and what happens with the component/basis pair.


Aha another day I can explain derivations, because those are quite interesting, especially in the context of the natural “derivative” in a space.
Back on the subject of expanding tangent vectors into its components, I should really practice the full derivation, and notational sugaring happening to fully understand what’s going on. Going to practice that on paper in fact.