Core Principles of Special and General Relativity

James H. Luscombe is Professor of Physics at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He received his PhD in Physics from the University of Chicago in 1983. After post-doctoral positions at the University of Toronto and Iowa State University, he joined the Research Laboratory of Texas Instruments, where he worked on the development of nanoelectronic devices, before joining the Naval Postgraduate School in 1994. He was Chair of the Department of Physics between 2003 and 2009. He teaches a wide variety of topics, including general relativity, statistical mechanics, mathematical methods, and quantum computation. He has published more than 60 research articles, has given more than 100 conference presentations, holds 2 patents, and is the author of Thermodynamics - an introductory textbook published by CRC Press.

"In my view, this is a very readable text and very student-friendly. The presentation of the content is clear and there are lots of detailed illustrative examples (which are absent in many other GR texts). You might be aware that there is a strong interest on General Relativity course nowadays due to recent detection of gravitational wave and black imaging. This particular text will have potential to be well-like by students."— Prof. Kenneth Hong Chong Ming, National University of Singapore

• 1. Relativity: A theory of space, time, and gravity 2. Basic special relativity 3. Lorentz transformation, I 4. Geometry of Lorentz invariance 5. Tensors on flat spaces 6. Lorentz transformation, II 7. Particle dynamics 8. Covariant electrodynamics 9. Energy-momentum of fields 10. Relativistic hydrodynamics 11. Equivalence of local gravity and acceleration 12. Acceleration in special relativity 13. Tensors on manifolds 14. Differential geometry 15. General relativity 16. The Schwarzschild metric 17. Physical effects of Schwarzschild spacetime 18. Linearized gravity 19. Relativistic cosmology. Appendix A: Invariance of the wave equation Appendix B: The Doppler effect Appendix C: Topics in linear algebra Appendix D: Topics in classical mechanics Appendix E: Photon and particle orbits