Feynman Lectures on Gravitation

Description

Based on the in-class lectures of Richard Feynman, this book covers a wide range of topics in physics and provides a window to the thoughts of a brilliant Nobel laureate. The Feynman Lectures on Gravitation are based on notes prepared during a course on gravitational physics that Richard Feynman taught at Caltech during the 196263 academic year. For several years prior to these lectures, Feynman thought long and hard about the fundamental problems in gravitational physics, yet he published very little. These lectures represent a useful record of his viewpoints and some of his insights into gravity and its application to cosmology, superstars, wormholes, and gravitational waves at that particular time. The lectures also contain a number of fascinating digressions and asides on the foundations of physics and other issues. Characteristically, Feynman took and untraditional non-geometric approach to gravitation and general relativity based on the underlying quantum aspects of gravity. Hence, these lectures contain a unique pedagogical account of the development of Einstein's general relativity as the inevitable result of the demand for a self-consistent theory of a massless spin-2 field (the graviton) coupled to the energy-momentum tensor of matter. This approach also demonstrates the intimate and fundamental connection between gauge invariance and the Principle of Equivalence.

About the Author
The late Richard P. Feynman was Richard Chace Tolman Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology. Feynman made many fundamental contributions to physics, particularly to the fields of quantum electrodynamics, quantum field theory, and particle physics. He is best known for the development of Feynman diagrams and path integrals. Feynman shared the Nobel prize in physics in 1965 for his work on quantum electrodynamics.


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