New Adler book on GR: Why do these coefficients go to zero?

In summary, the new book by Adler on General Relativity (GR) explores the mathematical behavior of certain coefficients in the theory, questioning why they approach zero. It delves into the implications of this phenomenon for the understanding of gravitational interactions and the broader context of GR, offering insights into the underlying physics and potential avenues for further research.
  • #1
peasg
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This is page 73 of the book. As you can see, the mixed derivatives with the affine connections vanish in the second term. Why does that happen? This is used to prove that the connections are not a tensor, and i figured you could also reason it out even without making those terms vanish.

OBS: The derivatives are avaliated at P, for the reason that this is obtained via a taylor series of the transformation coefficients.
 
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  • #2
peasg said:
View attachment 349323
This is page 73 of the book. As you can see, the mixed derivatives with the affine connections vanish in the second term. Why does that happen?
The terms ##\left( \dfrac{\partial^2 \bar x^j}{\partial x^l \partial x^i } \right)_P \Gamma^i_{pq} V^q dx^l dx^p## have been dropped because they contain products ##dx^l dx^p##. Therefore, these terms are second-order in the infinitesimal coordinate displacements. Only terms up to first order need to be kept.
 
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  • #3
TSny said:
The terms ##\left( \dfrac{\partial^2 \bar x^j}{\partial x^l \partial x^i } \right)_P \Gamma^i_{pq} V^q dx^l dx^p## have been dropped because they contain products ##dx^l dx^p##. Therefore, these terms are second-order in the infinitesimal coordinate displacements. Only terms up to first order need to be kept.
Oh, that makes perfect sense. Thank you for your time!
 
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