PHY132S Relativity - Class 5 - Monday April 6 2009

Theories of Gravity

In PHY131 we briefly talked about Newton's theory of gravity, and we are now discussing Einstein's theory.

For fun, you might enjoy reading about yet another approach to gravity discussed at: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/39512

Today's Class

Today we discussed the pieces used by Einstein in building the General Theory of Relativity, and a bit about the theory itself. The discussion followed §D.1 and §D.2 of the Supplementary Course Notes with one exception. (Yes I didn't even follow my own course notes!). The exception was a slightly more careful discussion of the Equivalence Principle. Below is a link to a little document that discusses this in the first half; the second half of the document is the "derivation" of gravitational time dilation which is in the course notes

The Side Screen Slides
Today's Journal
Flash animation of a Foucault pendulum
A small extension of the course notes. html version pdf version