Notes on Relativity and Cosmology - Physics Department, UCSB

10 CONTENTS
While I have worked to edit these notes and make them more complete,
they are still very much ‘notes’ as opposed to a textbook. Perhaps they will
slowly evolve into a true textbook, but such a transformation will take several
more years of teaching PHY312. So, please do not expect all of the usual bells
and whistles (index, detailed outside references, self-contained treatments of all
topics, etc.) Also, mistakes are likely. We caught many of them in 2001 and
I am sure that we will catch more this time around!! The good news though
(well, depending on your taste) is that I’ve felt free to write things things in a
fairly informal style 1 . Hopefully, this will seem less dry than a real textbook.
While I ask you to be forgiving, I do want to continue to improve these
notes for future students. So, if you have any comments, criticisms, or suggestions
(ranging from typos to major structural changes), please do tell me
about them (just phrase your comments kindly)! You can send them to me at
marolf@phy.syr.edu or tell me about them in person. I would like to thank all
past PHY312 students for their valuable feedback.
I hope you enjoy both these notes and the course.
Best Wishes,
Don Marolf
How to use these notes
I just want to make one thing very clear: Past students have told me that the
notes were invaluable and reasonably well written. However, they also told me
that the notes were next to useless without also attending the lectures. So,
don’t get caught in the trap of thinking ‘well, I have the notes, maybe it’s OK if
I skip class today to take care of an important errand....’ Yes, I will be lecturing
(more or less) ‘straight from the notes.’ But you can help me to provide a
dynamic and more useful class by voicing your questions and participating in
class discussions. I’ll look forward to talking with you.
Here is the right way to use these notes. By the way, I actually got this
from the Spring 2001 students. While they did not actually have the notes until
the day of the corresponding lecture (since the notes were not written until
then!), this is what they told me they would have liked to do: First, read the
notes before the lecture. Not everything will make sense at that point, so you
shouldn’t get obsessive about really ‘getting it’ then. However, it is important
to get an overview with two goals in mind:
• Get an idea of what the notes contain so that you don’t have to try to
copy down every word in lecture.
• Identify the hard or subtle bits that will require real concentration in
lecture. When you read the notes, think of questions that you would like
to ask in lecture.
1 Among other things, this means I will mark certain important paragraphs with random
numbers of stars (⋆) in order to draw your attention to them.