General Relativity

What is General Relativity?

Schucking starts his lecture with the question “What is General Relativity?” In this lecture, he discusses a number of important aspects of GR, such as parallel transport, the metric connection, torsion tension and teleparallelism. While discussing these, Schucking mentions work performed by Planck and Cartan on these concepts.

The Rise and Fall of the Fifth Force

Franklin discusses the idea of a fifth fundamental force of nature. CP violations, for example in the K-meson decay, could suggest a modification of the gravitational force. He discussed the repeat of a famous experiment by Fishbach, first performed by Eötvös, that could determine whether such as force exists. However, the results obtained were in …

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From the Schwarzschild Singularity to the Black Hole Horizon

This lecture by Eisenstaedt considers the interpretations of the Schwarzschild field solution for black holes. This recording is of quite bad quality. Combined with the absence of supporting material, it is very difficult to follow the lecture without prior knowledge.

General Relativity from Hilbert’s perspective

This lecture by Sauer covers the work done by Hilbert, in interaction with Einstein around 1915. Around this time, Einstein was working on a gravitational field equation. Hilbert was inspired by this after a visit by Einstein, and developed his well-known axioms and a dynamic field theory, further inspired by work done by Mie.

Why do rods contract? Extending Bell’s “Lorentzian Pedagogy” into General Relativity

Brown covers the topic of Lorentz contraction. This follows from the postulates of relativity, but is not explained by it. Earlier papers by Fitz-Gerald and Lorentz discuss a shape deformation in the context of a spherical collection of charges that moves, and deforms. Time dilation also follows from these considerations, however, Einstein added to this …

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