Season 12 Episode 3
Black holes and revelations on the Oxford Online Maths Club, because Alice is back to tell us about Einstein's theory of Generality Relativity.
Further Reading
More with Alice
Alice did another version of this presentation (without James interrupting), so if you want to see some material on gravitational waves, you can pick up the thread in this recording of that presentation.
You might like the episode we had last term on Special Relativity with Martha, (with Alice in chat!), at Special Relativity | Season 11 Episode 7.
Alice was also on Angel vs Demon | Season 11 Episode 5 where we played some games (no Physics, except a surprise appearance of a light cone)
More videos
Alice recommends the following YouTube channels and videos
- String Theory Explained – What is The True Nature of Reality? | Kurzgesagt
- Quantum Gravity: How quantum mechanics ruins Einstein's general relativity | Arvin Ash
- What is General Relativity? | ScienceClic English
Straight lines in curved spaces
Previous episodes with non-Euclidean geometry;
- Spherical Geometry | Season 9 Episode 10 Beth was on this episode from last year. We live on a sphere, let’s do geometry that uses that fact!
- Two Routes to Hyperbolic Geometry | Season 7 Episode 12. I think this episode from 2024 might be the most recent time we’ve seen “desk-cam”, when I wanted to show people a hyperbolic craft activity
- Projective Geometry | Season 7 Episode 5 Something I love about OOMC is that we answer questions you never had, like “What would a really big parabola look like?” Miles built a virtual world just for this episode, it was great fun.
None of these episodes cover precisely the geometry you need for General Relativity, but they’re all introductory insights into the sort of weirdness that you can get in spaces that are not flat.
Relativity
You can read Einstein’s book Relativity: The Special and General Theory (1916) for free, in English, on Project Gutenberg. In Einstein’s words the book is "intended, as far as possible, to give an exact insight into the theory of Relativity to those readers who, from a general scientific and philosophical point of view, are interested in the theory, but who are not conversant with the mathematical apparatus of theoretical physics".
Did you know that the Feynman lectures are available for free online too? I usually think of these as a series of textbooks based on the lectures by Richard Feynman but they’re also on the web.
LIGO
If we’d had time to cover gravitational waves, then I would have linked to these resources!
The LIGO educational website has lots of interesting material (lots of Caltech links in this edition of the Further Reading!).
Each year the Nobel Prize committee produce what they call "popular information" about each prize, so articles like this one from 2017 might be a good introduction to the physics of black holes.
One of the links on that page lets you hear (sound waves based on the data from) two black holes colliding.
If you want to get in touch with us about any of the mathematics in the video or the further reading, feel free to email us on oomc [at] maths.ox.ac.uk.