Introduction to General Relativity

Abstract

A student-friendly style, over 100 illustrations, and numerous exercises are brought together in this textbook for advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students in physics and mathematics. Lewis Ryder develops the theory of general relativity in detail. Covering the core topics of black holes, gravitational radiation, and cosmology, he provides an overview of general relativity and its modern ramifications. The book contains chapters on gravitational radiation, cosmology, and connections between general relativity and the fundamental physics of the microworld. It explains the geometry of curved spaces and contains key solutions of Einstein's equations - the Schwarzschild and Kerr solutions. Mathematical calculations are worked out in detail, so students can develop an intuitive understanding of the subject, as well as learn how to perform calculations. The book also includes topics concerned with the relation between general relativity and other areas of fundamental physics. Password protected solutions for instructors are available at www.cambridge.org/9780521845632.

Nonlinear Celestial Mechanics Orbits Revisited: An Effective Relativistic Lagrangean Approach

“…Here again the most massive object is at rest, positioned at the system center of mass, and the other orbits around it. The proposed lagrangean implies on a correction to the original classical Lagrangean in similar terms to the one developed in perturbation theory [19,20]. This type of derivation was previously performed in details by Lemmon [21] and D'Elisio [22] separately.…”

Shadow of the Moon and general relativity: Einstein, Dyson, Eddington and the 1919 light deflection

“…The name black hole itself appeared only later through the hand of Wheeler [72]. Then after the second world war, in the 1950s, a renaissance of general relativity back into physics took place [73], with Wheeler and his group in Princeton where at its beginning Einstein was an inspirational figure still around, Thorne, and Wheeler, Gravitation [78], written in 1973, an extraordinary treatise up-to-date in its approach and encompassing subjects, there is the book by Wald with advanced topics [79], there is the book by D'Inverno [80], that made general relativity a very easy subject to teach and learn, and there are others excellent books, e.g., [81,82].…”

Angular momentum of a relativistic wave packet

“…The Dirac equation in a general noninertial frame in Cartesian and cylindrical coordinates has been derived by Hehl and Ni [13] and Strange and Ryder [14] using standard methods [15][16][17][18]. Here we restrict ourselves to Cartesian coordinates and a rotating frame with no linear acceleration.…”