Notes on Relativity and Cosmology - Physics Department, UCSB

12 CONTENTS
way you deal with almost every thing you encounter. You will have succeeded
in understanding relativity when you have built up a new intuition based on
what Einstein discovered. Yes, this can be done! Intuition is basically a reflex,
albeit a mental as opposed to a physical one. We all know how to train our
reflexes in sports: practice! Yep, this is a little speech to stress the importance
of doing homework, and optional problems too.
Credits
PHY312 has it roots in a course originated by Austin Gleeson at the University
of Texas at Austin. During our time there as graduate students and teaching
assistants, D. Eric Smith and I had the opportunity to assist in the development
of the course and in the design of course materials. I am very grateful to Austin
Gleeson both for this experience and for his support during and since. Although
PHY312 is a very different course, many of the goals were similar and many of
the pedagogical ideas appearing in PHY312 and these notes stem from our work
together. In particular, I am indebted to Eric for our many long discussions in
which we struggled to find the most elementary way to phrase concepts and
arguments while still capturing all of the subtleties inherent in working with
curved spacetimes. It is fair to say that I obtained a deeper grasp of relativity
though these conversations than from any course. I can only hope my own
students have a similar experience, prodded by the homework problems below.
Many of these problems, by the way, came originally from the course in Texas
and are only slowly evolving over time.
Moving on to Syracuse, I would like to thank Eric Schiff, our current department
chair, for encouraging me to develop this course, as well as Peter Saulson
for his advice (on both pedagogical and experimental issues) and support. Finally,
I would like to thank all of my past students, either at Syracuse or in
Texas, for their valuable questions and comments.