× Lecture Notes on General Relativity Close
Lecture Notes on General Relativity by Matthias Blau
English | PDF | 2018 | 963 Pages | ISBN : N/A | 5.71 MB
1905 was Einstein’s magical year. In that year, he published three articles, on light quanta, on the foundations of the theory of Special Relativity, and on Brownian motion, each one separately worthy of a Nobel prize. Immediately after his work on Special Relativity, Einstein started thinking about gravity and how to give it a relativistically invariant formulation. He kept on working on this problem during the next ten years, doing little else. This work, after many trials and errors, culminated in his masterpiece, the General Theory of Relativity, presented in 1915/1916. It is widely considered to be one of the greatest scientific and intellectual achievements of all time, a beautiful theory derived from pure thought and physical intuition, capable of explaining, or at least describing, still today, more than 100 years later, every aspect of gravitational physics ever observed.
Einstein’s key insight was what is now known as the Einstein Equivalence Principle, the (local) equivalence of gravitation and inertia. This ultimately led him to the realisation that gravity is best described and understood not as a physical external force like the other forces of nature but rather as a manifestation of the geometry and curvature of space-time itself. This realisation, in its simplicity and beauty, has had a profound impact on theoretical physics as a whole, and Einstein’s vision of a geometrisation of all of physics is still with us today.
The aim of these lecture notes is to provide a reasonably self-contained introduction to General Relativity, including a variety of applications of the theory, ranging from the solar system to gravitational waves, black holes and cosmology. These lecture notes for an introductory course on General Relativity are based on a course that I originally gave in the years 1998-2003 in the framework of the Diploma Course of the ICTP (Trieste, Italy). Currently these notes form the basis of a course that I teach as part of the Master in Theoretical Physics curriculum at the University of Bern.
In the intervening years, I have made (and keep making) various additions to the lecture notes, and they now include much more material than is needed for (or can realistically be covered in) an introductory 1- or even 2-semester course, say, but I hope to have nevertheless preserved (at least in parts) the introductory character and accessible style of the original notes.
Without You And Your Support We Can’t Continue
Thanks For Buying Premium From My Links For Support
Download File Size:4.59 MB
|
