It often falls to a physicist to teach a conceptual astronomy course. It is easy to justify a treatment of general relativity in the context of massive stars, black holes, and cosmology. There are a number of good books available to serve as texts or references, including Thorne’s Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy and Robert Geroch’s General Relativity from A to B. The purpose of this article is to describe three experimental introductions to the mathematical and physical concepts of general relativity. These can be accomplished at little expense and require no advanced mathematics on the part of students.

1.
Kip S.
Thorne
,
Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy
(
W. W. Norton & Company Inc.
,
1994
).
2.
Robert
Geroch
,
General Relativity from A to B
(
University of Chicago Press
,
1978
).
3.
M.
Wood
,
W.
Smith
, and
M.
Jackson
, “
Curvature of spacetime: A simple student activity
,”
Phys. Teach.
54
,
572
(
Dec.
2016
).
4.
Michelle B.
Larson
et al., “
Science icebreaker activities: An example from gravitational wave astronomy
,”
Phys. Teach.
44
,
416
(
Oct.
2006
).
6.
K&J Magnetics Inc., http://www.kjmagnetics.com, part D41.
7.
James B.
Hartle
,
Gravity
, 1st ed. (
Addison Wesley
,
2003
), p.
18
.
8.
J. F.
Nye
, “
Some geometrical relations in dislocated crystals
,”
Acta Metallurgica
1
,
155
(
1953
).
9.
Readers can view the appendix and spreadsheets at TPT Online, https://www.scitation.org/doi/suppl/10.1119/10.0002377, under the Supplemental tab.
10.
Misner
et al.,
Gravitation
(
W. H. Freeman and Co.
,
1973
), Fig. 1.10.

Supplementary Material

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