Syllabus

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Course Description

Isaac Newton had this to say about his theory of gravity, which dominated the description of gravitationally interacting bodies for more than 200 years,

That one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one another, is to me so great an absurdity that, I believe, no man who has in philosophic matters a competent faculty of thinking could ever fall into it.

Through asking a wonderful set of questions, such as, "What would it be like to ride a beam of light? If a man falls freely, would he not feel his weight? If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?", Einstein began to address Newton's conundrum. The result was one of the most stunning achievements of modern physics---a geometric, field theory of gravity. This theory is a beautiful and intricate synthesis of mathematics and physics. The general theory of relativity allows us to describe the formation of black holes, the evolution of the entire universe, and the undulations of spacetime in gravitational waves, which are likely to be measured directly for the first time in the next three years. Without its predictive capabilities the Global Positioning System (GPS) would be useless within half an hour. And despite these spectacular successes, we still have not learned the right question to ask to open a royal road to quantum gravity. In Einstein's words:

If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask… for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.