8.962 General Relativity (Spring 2020, MIT OCW): Lecture 06

8.962 General Relativity

8.962 General Relativity (Spring 2020, MIT OCW). Instructor: Prof. Scott Hughes. 8.962 is MIT's graduate course in general relativity, which covers the basic principles of Einstein's general theory of relativity, differential geometry, experimental tests of general relativity, black holes, and cosmology. (from ocw.mit.edu)

Lecture 06 - The Principle of Equivalence

Introduction to the principle of equivalence: freely falling frames to generalize the inertial frames of special relativity. Two important variants of the equivalence principle (EP): The weak EP (one cannot distinguish free fall under gravity from uniform acceleration over "sufficiently small" regions); the Einstein EP (the laws of physics in freely falling frames are identical to those of special relativity over "sufficiently small" regions).

Go to the Course Home or watch other lectures:

Lecture 01 - Introduction and the Geometric Viewpoint on Physics

Lecture 02 - Introduction to Tensors

Lecture 03 - Tensors (cont.)

Lecture 04 - Volumes and Volume Elements; Conservation Laws

Lecture 05 - The Stress Energy Tensor and the Christoffel Symbol

Lecture 06 - The Principle of Equivalence

Lecture 07 - The Principle of Equivalence (cont.); Parallel Transport

Lecture 08 - Lie Transport, Killing Vectors, Tensor Densities

Lecture 09 - Geodesics

Lecture 10 - Spacetime Curvature

Lecture 11 - More on Spacetime Curvature