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Ich
Science Advisor
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It depends on the coordinates you choose. What you have to do is to account for space curvature, where circumference/radius != pi. You may either scale the circumference or the radius in your coordinates, but you can't have both be "proper" coordinates if space is curved.
In http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker_metric#General_metric", you scale the radius, and that is what the book does. You have to unscale r to get proper radial distance, but you can use r*dphi directly to get tangential proper distance.
In Hyperspherical coordinates, you scale the circumference, and r measures proper radial distance.
I almost exclusively use hypersherical coordinates, so there's no ambiguity between r now and proper distance now.
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