Practical Relativity

Professor Richard Henriksen is a full professor of astrophysics at Queen's University, Kingston (Canada). He was awarded his PhD at Manchester (UK) and he has been a senior visitor at Stanford (USA), a Humbolt Fellow in Germany and Engineur/chercheur at CEA Saclay in France. Professor Henriksen has published over 125 research papers of various kinds, many of which employ relativistic concepts. Together with Geoff Bicknell, he published in the astrophysical journal one of the first papers in which the formation of primordial black holes was calculated correctly. He has extensive experience lecturing, having lectured at all graduate and undergraduate levels in physics of most types. He has in addition presented many professional colloquia and has won the Queen’s University research excellence award. His areas of research range widely over the field of astronomy and astrophysics.

Preface Acknowledgements Introduction Part One: The World Without Gravity 1 Non-relativity for relativists 1.1 Vectors and reference frames 2 Invariance of physical law under change of inertial frame of reference 2.1 Prologue 2.2 The theory of light or electromagnetic waves 2.3 Measurement theory and the Lorentz transformations 3 Implications: Using and understanding the Lorentz transformations 3.1 Prologue 3.2 Kinematic applications 3.3 Kinematic acceleration 3.4 Geometrical optics 4 The measure of space-time 4.1 Prologue 4.2 Metric space-time 4.3 Four-vector dynamics 5 Electromagnetic theory in space-time 5.1 Prologue 5.2 Lagrangian dynamics of an electromagnetic charge 5.3 Electromagnetism for arbitrary inertial observers Part Two: Relativity with the Gravitational Field 6 Gravitational structure of space-time 6.1 Prologue 6.2 The weak gravitational field 6.3 Constant or stationary gravitational field 6.4 Strong gravitational field