A Short Course in General Relativity 2nd ed.

Author: J.Foster J.D. Nightingale
Publisher:
Publish Date: 1998-03-01
Features: This book is a short introduction to general relativity, intended primarily as a one-semester course for first-year graduate students (or for seniors) in physics, or in related subjects such as astrophysics. While we expect such students to have been exposed to special relativity in their introductory modern physics courses (most likely in their sophomore year), it is unlikely that they have used the standard 4-vector methods, and so we supply such a review in Appendix A. We strongly advise reading Appendix A first. Most students approaching general relativity require an introduction to tensors, and these are dealt within Chapter I and the first half of Chapter 2, where geodesics, absolute and covariant differentiation, and parallel transport are discussed. This enables us to discuss the spacetime of general relativity in the latter half of the chapter and takes us onto a discussion of the field equations in Chapter 3. In Chapter 4, the results learned are applied to physics in the vicinity of a massive object, where we have tried to compare general relativistic results with their Newtonian counterparts. Chapters 5 and 6, on gravitational radiation and the elements of cosmology, respectively, give further applications of the theory, but students wanting a more detailed knowledge of these topics (and indeed all topics) would have to turn to the texts referred to in the body of the book.