Comments on: Spacetime and black holes

By: Count Iblis

Count Iblis — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 00:26:22 +0000

A. Zee,

I can recommend Gerard ‘t Hooft’s lecture notes:

http://www.phys.uu.nl/~thooft/lectures/genrel.pdf

The book ”A short Course in GR” by J Foster and J.D Nightingale:

http://www.springer.com/sgw/cda/frontpage/0,11855,1-40197-22-81654042-0,00.html

Is an excellent introduction to GR for physics students. The book seems to have changed a bit from the first edition which I own.

By: Dissident

Dissident — Sun, 11 Dec 2005 19:50:07 +0000

Teodora, it’s even worse than that. Among the more bizarre academic experiences of the Dissident is a “big wig” theoretician (at least by his own reckoning) getting upset upon finding out that a grad student was taking a GR class: he considered it a waste of time. And this was a guy with a professed interest in astroparticle physics. Oh, the humanity…

By: A. Zee

A. Zee — Sun, 11 Dec 2005 19:20:15 +0000

Sean and Mark, thanks for the encouragement. I am sure that it will be fun; that’s why I volunteered for an undergrad course, the first I will teach here at UCSB. GR is by far the most beautiful subject in physics! Teodora, thanks also for the useful remarks. I agree completely that GR is easier to understand than QM; that was certainly true for me as an undergrad. I intend to go to the physics department and ask Hartle and Marolf some questions about their teaching experience. Two questions are on my mind. One is how fast I can zoom through special relativity in order to get to the “good stuff”. The other is that most of the remarks posted by people (for example regarding GR texts on Amazon) is that they find the math difficult. To me that is somewhat puzzling because I think that any student with a future in theoretical physics should have lots of problem understanding the physics, but not any difficulty with Riemannian geometry, which is after all totally logical and algorithmic. But perhaps I have simply forgotten what physics undergrads are capable of. Any thoughts about these two issues? My general tendency is wanting to cover too much, for example Penrose diagrams.

By: Teodora

Teodora — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 17:58:32 +0000

For me the best undergraduate material for GR remains the collection of Sean’s notes. I think it helps to have Sean around to explain what is going on. But the notes are very good on their own as well.

I started with Schutz but the notation and the vagueness of some chapters led me to migrate to Sean’s notes in the end. In college, I used Wald, but while I liked the rigour, I hated the lack of insight onto the physical implications of all the calculations. For another undergraduate class I used Kip’s book, but frankly, this one is nothing more than a great reference and should be never mistaken for a textbook.

I am surprised that GR is not an undergraduate requirement. It is not nearly as complicated and insightful as QM, plus the two were developed around the same period. Why teach the one without the other, especially when the clash between the two is such a hot modern topic!!! The concepts in QM are more shocking and sutble than the ones in GR. When GR starts to send electric shocks then one can say that a merge is cooking!

By: Mark

Mark — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 06:56:19 +0000

Have a blast Tony. I have an undergraduate relativity and cosmology class in the Spring, in which I’ll be drawing heavily on Hartle, and a graduate class next Fall, in which I’ll be turning to Carroll. Both excellent, and both requiring careful choices of the most important topics, since so much fun stuff is covered.

By: Sean

Sean — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 04:47:55 +0000

Tony, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it, it’s a fun class to teach. And Jim’s book is great, but has far too much good stuff in it — you have to be disciplined about sticking to the important bits (especially in a one-quarter course).

By: erc

erc — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 03:08:24 +0000

Well, obviously most UGs are smarter than most PGs – the “smart” ones are those who leave university to get jobs which pay, and don’t hang around to be insulted by those who are presumeably supposed to be encouraging and supervising them…

By: collin

collin — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 03:01:53 +0000

A. Zee — in my experience as both an undergrad and a grad student, *most* undergrads are smarter than most grad students.

By: A. Zee

A. Zee — Mon, 05 Dec 2005 22:10:57 +0000

I will be teaching the undergraduate GR course here at UCSB in the Spring. I plan to use Hartle, with Carroll as supplementary reading for the more ambitious students. This is actually the first time I have ever taught an undergraduate course at UCSB after more than 20 years here! I was talked into it by my colleague Lars Bildsten here at KITP, who claimed that some undergrads are actually smarter than some grad students (— kind of an empty statement!) I stumbled into this discussion; I should probably read it in its entirety and pick up a few pointers. I am just about at the stage of starting to think about what I should cover.

By: Plato

Plato — Sun, 04 Dec 2005 13:45:31 +0000

Jo Anne

So “six weeks” has long past in terms of Eric Adelberger experiments at Eotvos.

Modifications to General Relativity

Any News?