General Relativity - Fall 2006

Jan de Boer
First class: Thursday September 7
No class: Thursday October 26
Last class: Thursday December 7
Question session: Thursday December 14, 10.00
Written Exam: Thursday December 21, 10.00-13.00
lecture times: Thursdays 10.00-13.00
room: I1.01
(you can find the buildings on this map)
credits: 6EC

This course consists of a basic introduction to general relativity. The course will more or less follow the book Sean Carroll, Spacetime and Geometry (Pearson, 2003). A shorter version of the book, without exercises, are the lecture notes by Sean Carroll, which can be obtained for free from his website (see the 3rd link below). Below I will probably keep track of the topics covered each week, so that you can see where we stand in the class. There are many books about general relativity, and there is an astonishing amount of material available on the web, so it shouldn't be too hard to find additional background material. Two books worth mentioning are

B.F. Schutz, A First Course in General Relativity (Cambridge, 1985).
This book is widely recommended as a good introductory text.

S. Weinberg, Gravitation and Cosmology (Wiley, 1972).
This is an excellent book, which covers several subjects in great detail, it is however rather expensive and does not cover everything, there is for instance almost nothing about black holes in this book

There are several lecture notes available on the web, such as (list taken from Sean Carroll's webpage)

Lecture Notes on General Relativity, Sean M. Carroll, University of Chicago
General Relativity Tutorial, John Baez, UC Riverside
Physics 8.962, Ed Bertschinger, MIT
Lecture Notes on General Relativity, Petr Hadrava, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic
Black Hole Lecture Notes, Paul Townsend, Cambridge
A First Look at Relativity and Gravitation, Clifford Johnson, University of Kentucky
Tensors and Relativity, Peter Dunsby, Cape Town
Introduction to General Relativity, Gerard 't Hooft, Utrecht University
Modern Relativity
Introduction to Differential Geometry and General Relativity, Stefan Waner, Hofstra University
Lecture Notes on General Relativity, Matthias Blau, ICTP (postscript).

Other useful general relativity links are (again taken from Sean Carroll's webpage)

Relativity Bookmarks, Syracuse University
Relativity on the World Wide Web
Relativity and Black Hole Links, Andrew Hamilton, University of Colorado
Hyperspace, University of British Columbia
Living Reviews in Relativity
gr-qc archive, Los Alamos

The course will contain various exercises. We will discuss these in class. Once every three weeks or so a set of exercises will be given which should be handed in. They will be graded, and completing these successfully can yield an upgrade of final mark on the written exam.
The exercise sessions will be done by Ilies Messamah, imessama[at]science.uva.nl, room J/K 3.46, tel. 020-5255705.

September 7 (ps, pdf); exercises (ps, pdf)

September 14 (ps, pdf)

September 21 (ps, pdf)

September 28 (ps, pdf); Take home set 1 (ps, pdf)

October 5 (ps, pdf)

October 12 (ps, pdf)

October 19 (ps, pdf)

November 2 (ps, pdf); Take home set 2 (ps, pdf)

November 9 (ps, pdf)

November 16 (ps, pdf)

November 23 (ps, pdf)

November 30 (ps, pdf); Take home set 3 (ps, pdf)

December 7 (ps, pdf)
A popular article by Susskind (pdf)

Exam of December 18, 2003 (ps, pdf)