Bryce DeWitt's lectures on gravitation. Edited by Steven M. Christensen. (Q610159)

In 1971 B. De Witt read lectures about gravitation at Stanford University, leaving 400 pages of handwritten notes. Now they have been edited by S. Christensen, who also wrote the 3-pages preface. Due to the importance of De Witt, especially for the development of Einstein's theory and its quantization, the publication of these notes is a good idea: at least for historians of science it is valuable to see how relativity theorywas taught around 1970. However, one should not expect to have a textbook on the theory of gravitation in the usual sense, because most of the topics have been developed essentially in the recent 40 years. The contents is as follows: The first two chapters are on special relativity theory, containing several funny exercises like the following ones: what is the fuel consumption of a spacecraft if it is travelling for 50 years with constant acceleration \(g = 9.81\)m\(/\)s\(^2\)? How many years have elapsed within this time on Earth? Chapter 3 introduces groups and tensors, chapter 4 Riemannian manifolds, chapters 5 and 7 geodesics and the motion of particles, chapters 9, 12 and 13 conservation laws, whereas chapters 6, 8, 10, and 11 deal with solutions of Einstein's equations at different levels of approximation. Chapter 14 is on electromagnetic fields, and chapter 15 on gravitational waves. Six appendices present several detailed calculations of results of the main part of the text: Appendix A on spinning bodies, Appendix B on weak gravitational waves, Appendix C on spherically symmetric metrics, Appendix D on the Kerr metric, Appendix E on Friedmann cosmology and Appendix F on diffeomorphisms.