5 - Curved spacetime

Summary

The relativistic formulation of the laws of physics developed in Chapter 4 excluded gravitation, and our task in this chapter is to complete the story by incorporating this all-important interaction (our personal favorite!). In Sec. 5.1 we explain why relativistic gravitation must be thought of as a theory of curved spacetime. In Sec. 5.2 we develop the elementary aspects of differential geometry that are required in a study of curved spacetime, and in Sec. 5.3 we show how the special-relativistic form of the laws of physics can be generalized to incorporate gravitation in a curved-spacetime formulation. We describe the Einstein field equations in Sec. 5.4, and in Sec. 5.5 we show how to solve them in the restricted context of small deviations from flat spacetime. We conclude in Sec. 5.6 with a description of spherical bodies in hydrostatic equilibrium, featuring the most famous (and historically the first) exact solution to the Einstein field equations; this is the Schwarzschild metric, which describes the vacuum exterior of any spherical distribution of matter (including a black hole).

Gravitation as curved spacetime

5.1.1 Principle of equivalence

Relativistic gravity

The relativistic Euler equation (4.59), unlike its Newtonian version of Eq. (1.23), does not contain a term that describes a gravitational force acting on the fluid. To insert such a term requires an understanding of how the Newtonian theory of gravitation can be generalized to a relativistic setting.