Related papers: Subtle is the Gravity
These lectures notes contain an introduction to General Relativity. They are addressed to a general mathematical audience with no specific background in physics. The goal is to motivate and explain Einstein's theory of gravity and discuss…
The motivation for relativistic world is built on robust common sense and on general physical principles which are accessible to even a school student. Author likes to call it a farmer's perspective.
We explain in a very concise way the basic principles that lead from Galilean to General Relativity to make them understandable to students or general audience, even with little knowledge in physics and mathematics.
A modest aim of this pedagogical presentation is to analyze, critically, certain fundamental physical concepts to illustrate the physical principles behind the special theory of relativity and, hence, to also illustrate the limitations of…
Arguments are reviewed and extended in favor of presenting special relativity at least in part from a more mechanistic point of view. A number of generic mechanisms are catalogued and illustrated with the goal of making relativistic effects…
We discuss the nature and a general formulation of the relativity principle and we show that it can be justified starting from a strictly operational point of view. We give some remark on the connection with the spacetime symmetry groups.…
This brief review is intended to introduce gravitational physicists to recent developments in which general relativity is being used to describe certain aspects of condensed matter systems, e.g., superconductivity.
The nature of gravity is fundamental to our understanding of our own solar system, the galaxy and the structure and evolution of the Universe. Einstein's general theory of relativity is the standard model that is used for almost ninety…
The development of both special and general relativity is accomplished in a series of 6 papers using a simple approach. The purpose is to explain the how and why of relativity to a broad public, and to be useful for students of physics by…
A specific theoretical framework is important for designing and conducting an experiment, and for interpretation of its results. The field of gravitational physics is expanding, and more clarity is needed. It appears that some popular…
The purpose of these lectures is to discuss in some detail a new, non-perturbative approach to quantum gravity. I would like to present the basic ideas, outline the key results that have been obtained so far and indicate where we are headed…
We live at a time of contradictory messages about how successfully we understand gravity. General Relativity seems to work very well in the Earth's immediate neighborhood, but arguments abound that it needs modification at very small and/or…
I wish to expound a novel perspective of probing universal character of gravity. To begin with, inclusion of zero mass particle in mechanics leads to special relativity while its interaction with a universal force shared by all particles…
Einstein's theory of general relativity describes gravity as the interaction of particles with space-time geometry, as opposed to interacting with a physical fluid, as in the old gravitational aether theories. Moreover, any theoretical…
In this note, we discuss the significance of the general principle of relativity for a physical theory that abandons the newtonian concept of force and, hence, uses an entirely different conception for the ``cause'' behind motions of…
The aim of this short note is to realize that the main reason for non-mechanistic explanation of Newton's gravitational attraction, is explicitly encapsulated in his famous General Scholium of the second Edition of Principia Mathematica…
Two popular attempts to understand the quantum physics of gravitation are critically assessed. The talk on which this paper is based was intended for a general particle-physics audience.
We review the foundations of Einstein's general theory of relativity, discuss recent progress in the tests of relativistic gravity, and present motivations for new generation of high-accuracy gravitational experiments. We discuss the…
Special relativity is no longer a new revolutionary theory but a firmly established cornerstone of modern physics. The teaching of special relativity, however, still follows its presentation as it unfolded historically, trying to convince…
The goal of this lecture is to introduce the student to the theory of Special Relativity. Not to overload the content with mathematics, the author will stick to the simplest cases; in particular only reference frames using Cartesian…