PH471 - Introduction to General Relativity and Cosmology - Spring 2004

Course: PH471 - Introduction to General Relativity and Cosmology
Instructor: Ewan Stewart
Teaching assistant: Seo-Dong Shin
Webpage: http://cosmology.kaist.ac.kr/gr/
Time: 2:30 - 4:00pm, Tuesdays and Thursdays
Place: 209
Problem class: 7:00pm Tuesdays
Credits: 3
Evaluation: class participation, problems, exam

Course description

This course is an introduction to general relativity and cosmology. As the lectures will be in English, the course should also give you the opportunity to improve your English skills.

Syllabus and Lecture Notes

The lecture notes are in double page landscape format. On Linux use "lpr -Z shortedge" to print. Comments on these lecture notes will be greatly appreciated and will count towards class participation.

General Relativity
- Introduction
  - Introduction
  - Curved space: metric, geodesics
- Dynamics in Curved Spacetime
  - General formalism: light-cone, 4-acceleration, 4-force
  - Schwarzschild spacetime: black holes
- Dynamics of Curved Spacetime
  - Curvature: vectors, covectors, covariant derivative, curvature tensor
  - Einstein equation: gravitational action, energy-momentum tensor
Cosmology
- Big Bang Cosmology
  - Basic observed properties of the universe
  - Spatially homogeneous and isotropic expanding universe
- History of the Universe
  - Inflation: motivation, realizing inflation, generating perturbations
  - A brief history of the universe: inflation, nucleosynthesis, dark matter, cosmic microwave background, galaxies, accelerating universe
  - Accelerating universe: vacuum energy and the anthropic principle

Problems

Problems will appear here on Fridays. Put answers in Professor Kiwoon Choi's group's mailbox outside the physics department office by 7pm on Mondays.

Exam

The exam will be open book and open time. It will begin at 2pm on Saturday 5th June.

References

General relativity is a mature subject so most textbooks are adequate for it. The books below are particularly recommended. In contrast, cosmology is a young subject and I cannot recommend any textbook.