These lectures form part of the A2 course on Relativity and Gravitation. They extend the material covered in the first ten lectures by Declan Diver, on Special Relativity, by introducing some of the key ideas of general relativity - which Einstein published in 1919 as a relativistic theory of gravity. In the lectures we will explore the physical principles which led to Einstein's formulation of GR and investigate some of its astrophysical predictions, including the bending and redshifting of light in a gravitational field, geodesics of free particles and some introductory ideas about black holes.
 

Lecture Notes

Section 1: Basic Ideas about GR, the Equivalence Principles and their Consequences

       Page1  Page2    Page3  Page4    Page5  Page6    Page7   Page8   Page9    Page10    Page11   Page12

Section 2: Geodesics and Curved Spacetime: Basics

      Page1  Page2    Page3   Page4   Page5   Page6    Page7    "Rubber sheet" picture of spacetime

Section 3:  Measuring Intrinsic Curvature

      Page1   Page2    Page3    "Crawling ants" picture

        Circles and triangles on:    the Euclidean plane    a sphere        a saddle

     Small circles of different radius on the sphere

Section 4: Schwarzschild Spacetime

     Page1   Page2   Page3   Page4    Page5    Page6    Page7    Page8    Page9    Page10

Note that, due to the loss of Mondays to bank holidays, I will not cover the material in Section 4 this year. (It will be covered in the honours course on Gravitation and Relativity). For convenience, the remaining material to be covered in the final lecture is reproduced here

Please send any comments or questions on GR-I to Martin Hendry