Table of Contents

1. Special relativity and spacetime; 2. Special relativity and physical laws; 3. Geometry and curved spacetime; 4. General relativity; 5. The Schwarzschild solution and black holes; 6. Testing general relativity; 7. Cosmological solutions; 8. Our Universe; Index.

Promotional Information

Aimed at advanced undergraduates, this self-contained textbook covers the key ideas of special and general relativity and their applications.

About the Author

Robert Lambourne is Director of the Physics Innovation Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (piCETL) in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, The Open University. In 2002 he was awarded the Bragg medal and prize of the Institute of Physics for his contributions to physics education, and was made a National Teaching Fellow in 2006.

Reviews

'The author has done a great job of producing a text suitable for upper level undergrads and even first year graduate students. The graphics are very good and I particularly appreciate the concise chapter summaries and the exercises with solutions. Students will love this text. I will definitely use it in my upper division classes.' John Huchra, Harvard University

'The presentation of special and general relativity is remarkably clear, with explicit derivations and explanations accompanied by useful and relevant exercises. This text strikes a nice balance between theory and applications and does a commendable job of bringing undergraduates up to speed on a challenging topic. I highly recommend it for a first undergraduate course in general relativity.' Jeremy Darling, University of Colorado

'It is the few books intended for physics undergraduates with which [this] volume should be compared, and it comes out with flying colours … This is an excellent volume which can be highly recommended for an introductory course on general relativity and I hope will have the effect of increasing understanding of this most beautiful and striking creation of twentieth-century physics.' Contemporary Physics