Relativity and the Cosmos

In November of 1919, at the age of 40, Albert Einstein became an overnight celebrity, thanks to a solar eclipse. An experiment had confirmed that light rays from distant stars were deflected by the gravity of the sun in just the amount he had predicted in his theory of gravity, general relativity. General relativity was the first major new theory of gravity since Isaac Newton's more than 250 years earlier.

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Introduction to Differential Geometry and General Relativity

Here, we do just enough topology so as to be able to talk about smooth manifolds. We begin with n-dimensional Euclidean space.

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General Relativity

General relativity is a theory of gravitation and to understand the background to the theory we have to look at how theories of gravitation developed. Aristotle's notion of the motion of bodies impeded understanding of gravitation for a long time. He believed that force could only be applied by contact; force at a distance being impossible, and a constant force was required to maintain a body in uniform motion.

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Introduction to Special Relativity

Special relativity is a fundamental physics theory about space and time that was developed by Albert Einstein in 1905 as a modification of Newtonian physics. It was created to deal with some pressing theoretical and experimental issues in the physics of the time involving light and electrodynamics. The predictions of special relativity correspond closely to those of Newtonian physics at speeds which are low in comparison to that of light, but diverge rapidly for speeds which are a significant fraction of the speed of light. Special relativity has been experimentally tested on numerous occasions since its inception, and its predictions have been verified by those tests.

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What is Relativity?

The theory of relativity , or simply relativity, refers specifically to two theories of Albert Einstein: special relativity and general relativity. However, "relativity" can also refer to Galilean relativity.

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