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.
References
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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.
© 2020 American Association of Physics Teachers.
2020
American Association of Physics Teachers
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