Notes on Relativity and Cosmology - Physics Department, UCSB

Preface
Note: These lecture notes are available free of charge in color PDF from the
course web site: (http://www.phy.syr.edu/courses/PHY312.03Spring/). The
color version is particularly useful for getting the most out of complicated diagrams.
To view PDF you will need to install Adobe Acrobat reader (if you
don’t have it already). It is free from Adobe at:
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep.html.
A letter of introduction
Dear Students,
This collection of lecture notes is intended as a guide to the material in
PHY312: Relativity and cosmology. You are both lucky and unlucky to be
taking this course. The point is that this course is essentially unique: I know
of no other course anywhere that provides this thorough a treatment of both
special and general relativity at a level accessibly with only elementary calculus.
By your presence here, I take it that you are happy to have this opportunity!
However, because of the unique nature of this course there is simply no
adequate textbook on the market. In the first edition of this course, we used two
books (Relativity by A. Einstein and Inside Relativity by Mook and Vargish)
as supplemental reading. However, most of the course content was conveyed
directly through the lectures.
Then, in Spring 2000 I decided to type my lecture notes and distribute them
to the class in order to provide more relevant reading materials. The aim was to
allow students to spend more time listening and thinking during lectures and to
reduce their need to devote mental energy to merely copying things said in class
or written on the board. According to course evaluations this was a success and
students found the notes quite valuable. By the end of the semester, a more or
less complete (albeit sketchy) set of notes had been compiled.
Based on the recommendations of Spring 2000’s students, I replaced one of
the supplemental texts (Mook and Vargish) with this compilation of notes in
Spring 2001. We continue to keep the Einstein book to allow you to get some
of our story direct from the horse’s mouth. However, these notes constitute the
main ‘text.’
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