Instructor:
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Nick Gnedin
Associate Professor
Office: AAC 020 (one of the Guardians of the Deep)
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Office hours: I am on campus on Tue and Thu
Course Info and Resources
Course homepage: http://home.fnal.gov/~gnedin/teaching/ASTR28200
The course will combine visualization, physical understanding, and
mathematics. I will assume that you are familiar and comfortable with
matrices (necessary for understanding Lorentz transformations) and with
calculus (necessary for understanding metrics). The mathematics will not be
fearsome (we will not be doing tensors or anything like that), but I will
assume that you are the kind of person for whom mathematics helps rather
than hinders understanding. If you do not fall into this category, you
should consider not taking this course.
We will start with a brief rush over Special and General Relativity,
turning to physics of black holes in the third week of this
course. After we understand how black holes work, we will look around
to check where they pop up in nature.
The textbook:
- Exploring Black Holes: Introduction To General Relativity, by
Edwin F. Taylor and John Archibald Wheeler, Addison Wesley Press, 2000
(QC173.6 .T39 2000)
- The textbook only covers the GR part fo this
course. Regretfully, there are no good textbooks on the black hole in
astropysics. Event more regretfully, there are no even bad textbooks,
so we will have to use original research papers. At least you should
have a sense of adventure...
The final grade of the course will be determined according to the
following rule:
- Homeworks (6): 60%
- In-class projects (5): 50%
If you add that up, it comes to 110%. To make it add to 100%, I will delete
the worst 10% of your score. That means you can do badly on two homeworks
or on two projects (or in one of each). However, only completed
assignments can be dropped! I.e., you cannot use your extra 10% to
simply skip some of the projects or homeworks.
Homework:
You need to turn the homework in to me in person, and make sure that I mark
your homework as submitted on my list. Please, do not leave them in my
mailboxes. Your homework will not be considered submitted unless it is
checked in!
Projects:
Projects will be completed in class. I will ask you to split into groups of
2 to 3, and work on projects jointly. You are very welcome to look at the
project before hand.
