PHYS 458, Relativity, Fall Semester, 2017

Contacts:

Position: Professor of Physics

Office: 4-281C CCIS-Physics

Tel.: (780) 492-2150

Fax: (780) 492-0714

E-Mail: pogosyan_at_ualberta.ca

eClass: https://eclass.srv.ualberta.ca

Course description and basic information:

Syllabus (html, pdf)

Assignments:

Assignment #1, due date

Assignment #2, due date

Differential Geometry formulae (html, pdf).

Spherical Geometry Primer

Assignment #3,

Assignment #4,

Assignment #5,

Assignment #6,

Black hole in Lemaitre coordinates: ( pdf)

Midterm

Final

I may be updating this description of the final a bit alogn the way, please continue revisiting this page

Final rules: open book, open notes, open your own copies of assingments (yes, I changed my mind), but no assignment solutions that I have provided. Please, no communication devices -- laptops, wifi, internet enabled phones. Calculators are fine, have them for any case.

Final topics . We have covered topics from chapters 1,2,3,4,5,7,8,9. (Instead of Filkenstein coordinates in Chapter 11 I have introduced Lemaitre coordiantes which are not in the text) Although the final will not stray away from what was specifically covered in lectures , reading those chapters in full will give you the context that will allow you to zoom into necessary topic quicker at the exam. I am almost certain there will be a problem about Schwartzschield and/or Lemaitre geometry, so pay attention to solutions for the last assigments and the last lectures. The empahsis of the final will be more on GR than SR.

Hint: With open book/ open notes policy, the point of preparation is not to memorize the formulas, but have a clear picture how different concepts fit together, and what question is about what.

Level of presentation detail: I will try to be maximally explict what information can be taken for granted (perhaps copied from text/notes, or if you know particular formula just written down and used ) and what steps need to be derived in your submission. If a step is required to be derived, derivation must be shown with all intermediate steps, even if it can be found in text/notes. In all cases, do not just use references to text/notes without providing the formulas to be used. You answer should contain all the steps necessary, derived or not. I.e it is not sufficient to write - "substituting this frequency in formula 28 of the textbook we obtain ...", even if result in formula 28 is not required to be derived. Proper answer would be : " The change of the frequency of the photon is given by the formula (copy formula 28 here). Substituting ..." By default, formulas that are "starting point" to the problem need not be derived, but intermediate steps that lead to the requested answer do need to be derived in detail.

Notation and formalism: Be consistent and correct in your notation. In most cases (except introductory SR questions) use of covariant notation (proper vector and tensor notation with correct handling of covariant and contravariant indexes) is either required or highly encouraged. Do not fall back to 3D SR notation when not dealing specifically with Minkowski space-time. In most cases this will lead to mistakes in general curved space-time. I will accept correct answers in any notation or formalism, but I would like to stress "the correct" here. And correctness is difficult and often impossible to achieve using inappropriate formalism.