General Relativity

Intrigued by General Relativity? Took a year of college physics?

Watch my youtube lectures titled: "Newton-Einstein GRavity: Introduction to General Relativity".

Click here for an accompanying guide to the lectures.

Always wanted to read Einstein's semi-popular book on General Relativity? Well, here's A Guide to Einstein's Calculations for Cosmology in his book "The Meaning of Relativity" - consult this as you go through the calculation there.

And to assist you in learning general relativity from these lectures, I've completed the manuscript for an accompanying textbook (with many examples, solved problems, diagrams, and references) aimed at YOU: "Warped Spacetime, the Einstein Equations, and the Expanding Universe : A Calculus-based Introduction to General Relativity", see it on Amazon.

A more introductory-level textbook: I completed the manuscript for a textbook which brings a reader familiar with basic Newtonian physics up to the point where they have some idea of what General Relativity is about, but at a more elementary level, and prepares readers for study of my above-mentioned (slightly more advanced) text. Newton-Einstein Gravity: An Introduction to the Geometry of Space+Time: Prelude to General Relativity .

Over the years ('02, 04, '06, '09, '11, '13) I gave differently-structured lecture series based on the two texts, in NYU (and BGU). In coordination with the American Institute of Physics (AIP) some were attended by undergraduates in various NY-area universities who were members of the local chapters of the AIP's National Society of Physics Students (SPS).

A Youtube-based academic course is being built from these materials: Interested Universities or Educational Materials companies please contact me.

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For diagonal metrics: I derived a very simple formula for calculation of the Riemann & Einstein tensor components.

Further references for readers of the text .

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Research interests

Topological Inflation: possibly the first article to broach the subject:: we show (in the section on inflationary bubbles) that bubbles of false vacuum containing a sufficiently strong hedgehog field [inside] are always inflationary, i.e. they cannot recollapse. See opening-sentence reference to the above paper in the papers by Nobuyuki Sakai :

Some Publications in Professional Journals

Spherically Symmetric Solutions of Einstein's field equations; also: Related and Unexpected Symmetries in Newtonian Gravity and General Relativity. (Some of the research results are reflected in my texts book mentioned above and the papers listed below.)

also for Five-Dimensional General Relativity