Coverage of Topics and Study Notes:

Chapter 22 has well written coverage of some of the hottest topics in astrophysics, but it is very long. I will try to cover the most important parts of each section.  Use you lecture notes as the main guide to the important material in the chapter when you study for the quiz.

In lecture, I will emphasize some aspects of special relativity and general relativity that the author has not emphasized.  However, you will find that the text has been extremely well written to give you a "feel" for relativity without getting into techincal details, so it is worth reading carefully. Two examples of different emphasis are these:

Einstein's principle of equivalence (p. 583).  My basic coverage could be summarized as:

The force of gravity may be replaced by acceleration due to curved space-time.

It can be made easier to see as:

Large mass tells space-time how to curve. 

The curvature of space-time tells small mass how to accelerate.

The principle will work for equal masses too, but it's harder to visualize.

Embedding Diagrams.  Figures 22-19 and 22-20 give you a sense of the effects of curved-space time.  Figures like these can be described at showing two dimensions of space in horizontal directions, and the amount of curvature as the direction downward.  Highly curved space-time has the effect of accelerating matter toward its center.  Physicists call this an attractive "well"  and see matter as falling down into the well.  For that reason, the curvature is plotted in negative or downward direction.  These figures are called embedding diagrams.

More Precisely 22-1, Special Relativity, has been dramatically improved in the 5th edition!  More Precisely 22-2 contains important coverage of the successful verification of General Relativity. Discovery 22-1 will also be covered, so please read it.

Review Questions: :

Review and Discussion: Number 6 has a misprint.  The last word should be "pulsars" instead of "matter."

Skip numbers 16, 19, and 20.

Conceptual Self-Test: True of False/Multiple Choice:  Number 13 could be answered a or b.

Skip the Problems, unless you want to use them to find out just how extreme the conditions in neutron stars and black holes are. I don't think they're needed for our purposes of understanding the concepts.