Sector Models - A Toolkit for Teaching General Relativity. Part 1: Curved Spaces and Spacetimes

Understand

Teaching the general theory of relativity to high school or undergraduate students must be based on an approach that is conceptual rather than mathematical.

• In this paper we present such an approach that requires no more than elementary mathematics.
• The central idea of this introduction to general relativity is the use of so-called sector models.
• Sector models describe curved spaces the Regge calculus way by subdivision into blocks with euclidean geometry.