Note: GR Marathon #8 will be happening at 14:0
Howdy! This page will be dedicated for the "General Relativity Marathon", a magical secret seminar that will happen every Saturday in RIII Seminar Room at a time that is usually announced here.
You can find the lecture notes prepared for this seminar here (click). They will be updated regularly.
The topic of this seminar is The theory of general relativity. I'll be updating this page with relevant material: mainly the lectures notes I'll be writing for this seminar, as well as presentation slides when needed, some resources/links/books and whatever I found to be of aid in my understanding of the theory. Let's see how this goes!
Resources I found useful in order of usefulness:
Books (all available at our Library):
- General Relativity by Wald: Excellent book. Gets to the physics right away and introduces the maths when necessary.
- Spacetime and Geometry by Carol: Starts introducing all the maths first. It can be a bit slow at the beginning.
- General Theory of Relativity by P.A.M. Dirac: Extremely concise (less than 70 pages) which makes it very handy if you're already familiar with the subject. Doesn't motivate anything. Excellent for reference/revision.
- Gravitation by Misner Thorne and Wheeler: Very nice writing which makes it entertaining to read, but it's a giant book. Uses weird notation and analogies sometimes. This book is considered "too old" by many.
Online lectures (in general: watch at 2x):
- What is a Tensor? , What is a Manifold? , What is General Relativity? series by XylyXylyX: Excellent, very highly recommended. The first two series introduces the mathematics with GR in mind. They're pretty long (130+ hours in total, or 60+ hours if you watch at 2x), but very comprehensive. They tend more towards the mathematical side. The last of them "What is General Relativity" is still ongoing to this date.
- General Relativity by Alexander Maloney: A graduate course on general relativity. I enjoyed these a lot.
- General Relativity by Leonard Suskind: Only 10 lectures. Very popular. I find them OK.
| Session Date | Topic |
|---|---|
| 15th September | Introduction, degrees of freedom, notions of invariance, locality, field theories, motivation |
| 22nd September | Session canceled due to Jacobs Games and Alumni Homecoming |
| 29th September | Special relativity: Part 1 - Inertial frames, Galilean transformations, Lorentz transformations |
| 6th October | Special relativity: Part 2 - Lorentz transformations, Lorentz invariance, four vectors |
| 13th October | Special relativity: Part 3 - Metrics and the correct notion of distance, the invariant interval, tensors, the Minkowski metric, the geometry of SR |
| 20th October | Session canceled due to organizer being away for the weekend. |
| 27th October | The Algebra of SR, worked examples and paradoxes |
| 3rd November | Double Session: Motivation to GR, the Einstein equivalence principle, the principle of general covariance, tensors |
| 10th November | Session canceled due to the University Physics Competition happening during the weekend |
| 17th November | Tensors, the Einstein summation convention, coordinate transformations |
| 24th November | Double Session: Pseudo-riemanian manifolds, topology |
| 1st December | The geodesic equation, the christoffel symbols, parallel transport, the covariant derivative |
| Winter Break | |
| 8th February | Review, the covariant derivative, the metric connection, curvature |
| 15th February | Curvature, fluid mechanics, the energy-stress tensor |
| 22nd February | The energy-stress tensor, the Einstein tensor, the Einstein Field Equation |
| 1st March | Determining the constant, the newtonian limit, symmetries, Lie derivatives and the killing equation |
| 8th March | The Schwarzchild solution, the Schwarzchild blackhole, Kruzkal coordinates |
| 15th March | Kruzkal coordinates, conformal transformations, causal structures and Penrose diagrams |
| 22nd March | Optional topics: The FLRW Model, the linearised EFE, the Kerr solution, the teleparallel equivalent of GR, the warp drive metric |