General Relativity Coursebook

This contributed volume explores the renaissance of general relativity after World War II, when it transformed from a marginal theory into a cornerstone of modern physics. Chapters explore key historical processes related to the theory of general relativity, in addition to presenting a thorough treatment of the relevant science behind these episodes.

In the late 20th and beginning 21st century high-precision astronomy, positioning and metrology strongly rely on general relativity. Supported by exercises and solutions this book offers graduate students and researchers entering those fields a self-contained and exhaustive but accessible treatment of applied general relativity.

There exist essentially two levels of investigation in theoretical physics. One is primarily descriptive, concentrating as it does on useful phenomenological approaches toward the most economical classifications of large classes of experimental data on particular phenomena. The other, whose thrust is explanatory, has as its aim the formulation of those underlying hypotheses and their mathematical representations that are capable of furnishing, via deductive analysis, predictions - constituting the particulars of universals (the asserted laws)- about the phenomena under consideration.

This book is written for theoretical and mathematical physicists and mat- maticians interested in recent developments in complex general relativity and their application to classical and quantum gravity.
Calculations are presented by paying attention to those details normally omitted in research papers, for pedagogical r- sons. Familiarity with fibre-bundle theory is certainly helpful, but in many cases I only rely on two-spinor calculus and conformally invariant concepts in gravitational physics. The key concepts the book is devoted to are complex manifolds, spinor techniques, conformal gravity, ?-planes, ?-surfaces, Penrose transform, complex 3 1 – – space-time models with non-vanishing torsion, spin- fields and spin- potentials. 2 2 Problems have been inserted at the end, to help the reader to check his und- standing of these topics. Thus, I can find at least four reasons for writing yet another book on spinor and twistor methods in general relativity: (i) to write a textbook useful to - ginning graduate students and research workers, where two-component spinor c- culus is the unifying mathematical language.

This book provides a completely revised and expanded version of the previous classic edition ‘General Relativity and Relativistic Astrophysics’. In Part I the foundations of general relativity are thoroughly developed, while Part II is devoted to tests of general relativity and many of its applications. Binary pulsars – our best laboratories for general relativity – are studied in considerable detail. An introduction to gravitational lensing theory is included as well, so as to make the current literature on the subject accessible to readers. Considerable attention is devoted to the study of compact objects, especially to black holes.