Overview

Welcome to Ph 504: Relativity, where we will learn special relativity for the next couple of weeks. I have attached some of the lecture notes and problem sets below, although we will cover more content in class (including various paradoxes (such as twin, barn, Supplee, Bell’s spaceship, and Ehrenfest paradoxes), aberration of light, doppler effect, Lagrangians and Hamiltions, dynamics, collisions, and $E=mc^2$).

Prerequisites/difficulty

I assume mastery of calculus and familiarity with linear algebra. A review will be included. The material and difficulty of the first lecture comes from Morin’s Introduction to Classical Mechanics and the following lectures have the same difficulty as Landau and Lifshitz Vol 1 and Vol 2.

Notes and Psets

Topic/Lecture Notes	Problem Sets
Basic Relativistic Effects	PSet 1
Tensors, Intervals, and Lorentz Transformations	PSet 2
Paradoxes and Dynamics	PSet 3