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Excellent Lectures about Gravity (Physics)

Total
4 out of 5 stars
Ejecución
4 out of 5 stars
Historia
4 out of 5 stars

Revisado: 05-05-19

I just finished listened to these lecture series by Prof Benjamin Schumacher. I enjoyed learning about the history of our understanding about gravity. While I am familiar with the physics from classical mechanics, I was glad to go into detail about the physics from general relativity. The included pdf (220 pages) was a nice addition to the lectures. Here are some of my favorite quotes:
“But a solid body held together by gravity, by a long-range attractive force between all masses, will tend to pull itself into a spherical shape. Every piece of the body is attracted to every other, even the pieces on the other side. And a sphere is the shape that minimizes the distances between all the pieces. The more massive the body, the stronger this tendency will be. But gravity is so weak that a solid body has to be many hundreds or even a thousand kilometers across before this sphere-making proclivity of gravity will win out.”
In explaining the tidal effect, Prof Schumacher instructs students to “imagine the fall of a spherical cloud of apples.” And then with a simple explanation from Newton’s law of universal gravitation he explains the mysterious force that squeezes in from the sides and also stretches out along the up-and-down direction the cloud as it falls freely.
Many lectures are ended with a preview or teaser of the next lecture, followed by a kind remark to the students, “And I’ll see you then.” I can imagine Prof Schumacher given this remark in the university.
The questions and answers on the pdf document are well though-out. The most thought-provoking question to me was Question 1 of Lecture 9: “How can we tell whether a piece of anomalous data requires us to change our basic theory?”
I recommend this lecture series to anyone interested in understanding gravity, tides, and black holes. I’m sure a future recording of the same lectures will be updated to include the important LIGO discovery in 2017.

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