Basics Of Relativity (eBook)

The present book has a single purpose: to provide a clear introduction to general relativity, suitable for graduate students or advanced undergraduates. I have attempted to include enough material so that almost any one-semester introductory course on GR can find the appropriate subjects covered in the text, but not too much more than that. The primary question facing any introductory treatment of general relativity is the level of mathematical rigor at which to operate. There is no uniquely proper solution, as different students will respond with different levels of understanding and enthusiasm to different approaches. Surprisingly, there are very few formal prerequisites for learning general relativity; most of the material is developed as you go along. The structure of the book should be clear. Each of the subjects has witnessed an explosion of research in recent years, so the discussions here will be necessarily introductory, but I have tried to emphasize issues of relevance to current work. The appendices serve various purposes: there are discussions of technical points which were avoided in the body of the book, crucial concepts which could have been put in various different places, and extra topics which are useful but outside the main development. Since the goal of the book is pedagogy rather than originality, I have often leaned heavily on other books when their expositions seemed perfectly sensible to me. When this leaning was especially heavy, I have indicated it in the text itself. Contents: Galilean Era and Newton Science, Basic Principles, Complex of Relativity Phenomena, Acceleration and Gravity, Inertial Frames, The Schwarzschild Metric from Kepler's 3rd Law , Theory of Relativity, Special Relativity, General Relativity, Theory of General Relativity