Black Holes: An Introduction to General Relativity

I took Kip Thorne’s graduate level General Relativity course at Caltech from 1998 – 1999.

Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity is notoriously difficult to grasp, and I wanted to see if I could learn it. Kip Thorne is one of the best theoretical physicists specializing in General Relativity in the world, and so the opportunity to take his class is one of the truly great aspects of being at Caltech — the professors are the best of the best in their fields, and to learn physics directly from them is out-of-this world amazing… Kip was also extremely nice and personable, very popular on campus, and that made the class all the better.

I did find I could learn General Relativity and really enjoyed it. Though it was an extremely difficult class. The textbook was akin to a NYC phone book: it had nearly 1,300 thin, delicate pages; it was over 2 inches thick; and weighed nearly 6 pounds.

Years later, as a physics professor at UVaWise, I had some really bright and motivated students. Great students, all so unique, super respectful, and so smart and curious. They were as smart as any students at any school, even a school like MIT, in my opinion, and so I wanted to offer them what at the time was a course offered to undergraduates at MIT, but at few other schools. An introductory course in general relativity that would teach them to use the metric for curved spacetime in the vicinity of a black hole.

I offered the course in the Fall of 2007, called it Black Holes: An Introduction to General Relativity and used for the textbook Exploring Black Holes: An Introduction to General Relativity. I based it off of an MIT course, and used the same homework sets they used.

The students excelled in this course. UVaWise is an undergraduate-only institution, in the Appalachian Mountains, with no physics major offered, only a physics minor (I worked on changing that during my time there), and my students did as well in this course as the students at MIT.

As part of my pre-tenure review year, I was required to get teaching evaluations from my peers: the other professors in my department. I asked two of them to sit in on my Black Holes class, and here you can read their evaluations of my teaching of this course.

Black Holes Teaching Evaluation by Prof. Margie Tucker

Black Holes Teaching Evaluation by Prof. Kevin Jones