American Association of Physics Teachers
 DESIGNING YOUR COURSE:
     DECISIONS AND APPROACHES
Teaching General Relativity to Undergraduates

Proposed at the AAPT workshop, Syracuse University, July 20-21, 2006

Your answers to each of these questions should have a major effect on how you structure your course and the goals you set for it.  But there are many more questions to be asked and much to be said about different answers to these questions.  A copy of this set of decisions questions has been placed on the DecisionQuestion page of  AAPT's TGRU wiki.  Go there to contribute your own thoughts and to add to or modify this set.  When the list and comments becomes more perfect, we can put it here on the main web page.

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GENERAL RELATIVITY COURSE FOR GENERAL STUDENTS
 (presented by Wolfgang Christian)

 A general interest course has a narrative for why we need GR, but does not explain GR.

 The narrative line of the course should be
      Phenomena --> Experiments/Observations --> Newtonian prediction (simulation) -->
         Failures of Newtonian theory --> Need for GR --> Correct GR Simulation            

 

Topics

Input 

GR application

1.

Tides 

Equiv Principle

 

2.

Light Shifting   

Doppler

GPS with gravity corrections. Doppler shifts Spacetime diagrams, Reference Frames

3.

Light bending     

Why doesn’t International Space Station fall?
 Orbits

Correct bending (geodesics)
Lensing

 

4.

Black Holes

Spectral Lines
 Escape Velocity

Maser data (odd behavior as r --> Ro)

5.

CMB/Hubble

Data

Cosmology
What don’t we understand?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Possible Activities

a. Taylor-Wheeler projects
b. Same acceleration in vacuum for all
c. Elevator acceleration
d. Construct spacetime diagrams from a movie
e. Einstein toy

 

 

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