Thursday, 27 April 2017

general relativity - What is the stress energy tensor?


I'm trying to understand the Einstein Field equation equipped only with training in Riemannian geometry. My question is very simple although I cant extract the answer from the wikipedia page:


Is the "stress-energy" something that can be derived from the pseudo-Riemannian metric (like the Ricci tensor, scalar curvature, and obviously the metric coefficients that appear in the equation) or is it some empirical physics thing like the "constants of nature" that appear in the equation? Or do you need some extra mathematical gadget to specify it? Thanks and apologies in advance if this is utterly nonsensical. Also, as a non-physicists I'm not sure how to tag this either so sorry for that as well.




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