Feynman Lectures On Gravitation [Hardcover]

The Feynman Lectures on Gravitation are based on notes prepared during a course on gravitational physics that Richard Feynman taught at Caltech during the 1962-63 academic year. For several years prior to these lectures, Feynman thought long and hard about the fundamental problems in gravitational physics, yet he published very little. These lectures represent a useful record of his viewpoints and some of his insights into gravity and its application to cosmology, superstars, wormholes, and gravitational waves at that particular time. The lectures also contain a number of fascinating digressions and asides on the foundations of physics and other issues.Characteristically, Feynman took an untraditional non-geometric approach to gravitation and general relativity based on the underlying quantum aspects of gravity. Hence, these lectures contain a unique pedagogical account of the development of Einstein's general theory of relativity as the inevitable result of the demand for a self-consistent theory of a massless spin-2 field (the graviton) coupled to the energy-momentum tensor of matter. This approach also demonstrates the intimate and fundamental connection between gauge invariance and the principle of equivalence.Foreword Quantum Gravity Lecture 1 * A Field Approach to Gravitation * The Characteristics of Gravitational Phenomena * Quantum Effects in Gravitation * On the Philosophical Problems in Quantizing macroscopic Objects * Gravitation as a Consequence of Other Fields Lecture 2 * Postulates of Statistical Mechanics * Difficulties of Speculative Mechanics * The Exchange of One Neutrino * The Exchange of Two Neutrinos Lecture 3 * The Spine of the Graviton * Amplitudes and Polarizations in Electrodynamics, Our Typical Field Theory * Amplitudes for Exchange of a Graviton * Physical Interpretation of the Terms in the Amplitudes * The Lagrangian for the Gravitational Field * The Equations for the Gravitational Field * Definition of Symbols Lecture 4 * The Connection lC)