Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Background: what you need to know before you start
- 1 Gravity on Earth:
- 2 And then came Newton
- 3 Satellites
- 4 The Solar System
- 5 Tides and tidal forces
- 6 Interplanetary travel
- 7 Atmospheres
- 8 Gravity in the Sun
- 9 Reaching for the stars
- 10 The colors of stars
- 11 Stars at work
- 12 Birth to death
- 13 Binary stars
- 14 Galaxies
- 15 Physics at speed
- 16 Relating to Einstein
- 17 Spacetime geometry
- 18 Einstein's gravity
- 19 Einstein's recipe
- 20 Neutron stars
- 21 Black holes
- 22 Gravitational waves
- 23 Gravitational lenses
- 24 Cosmology
- 25 The Big Bang
- 26 Einstein's Universe
- 27 Ask the Universe
- Appendix: values of useful constants
- Glossary
- Index
Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Background: what you need to know before you start
- 1 Gravity on Earth:
- 2 And then came Newton
- 3 Satellites
- 4 The Solar System
- 5 Tides and tidal forces
- 6 Interplanetary travel
- 7 Atmospheres
- 8 Gravity in the Sun
- 9 Reaching for the stars
- 10 The colors of stars
- 11 Stars at work
- 12 Birth to death
- 13 Binary stars
- 14 Galaxies
- 15 Physics at speed
- 16 Relating to Einstein
- 17 Spacetime geometry
- 18 Einstein's gravity
- 19 Einstein's recipe
- 20 Neutron stars
- 21 Black holes
- 22 Gravitational waves
- 23 Gravitational lenses
- 24 Cosmology
- 25 The Big Bang
- 26 Einstein's Universe
- 27 Ask the Universe
- Appendix: values of useful constants
- Glossary
- Index
Summary
From the author to the reader
Why this book is about gravity
During the 35 years that I have done research in gravitation, I have watched with amazement and delight as my colleagues in astronomy have, step-by-step, opened up almost the entire Universe to our view. And what a view! There are punctures in space called black holes that capture gas and stars with a relentless and unbreakable grip; there are 10km balls called neutron stars that are immense overgrown atomic nuclei with more mass than our Sun, that spin about their axes hundreds of times per second while emitting intense beams of radiation; there are bursts of gamma-rays from the most remote regions of the Universe that are so intense that they outshine the rest of the Universe for a short time; and most strikingly of all there was the beginning of time itself in an explosion of pure energy, driven by a force we do not understand, in which matter as we know it did not exist, in which even the laws of Nature themselves were mutable.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Gravity from the Ground UpAn Introductory Guide to Gravity and General Relativity, pp. xiii - xxiiPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003