PHY483/1483F: General Relativity

UPDATE

To get to the solutions from last year, go to the address bar of your browser and type in the "password" :-) at the end of this URL.

Final exam format

The final exam has SIX questions and you must choose ANY FOUR.

Each question is worth 25 marks, for a total of 100 marks.

All mathematical formulae you may need, which are not in Carroll (chapters 1-6 and Appendices B,F,G,J) or in lecture notes, will be provided on the back page.

ROUGHLY, the six questions will focus on: special relativity; geodesics; curvature; index gymnastics / Einstein equation; energy-momentum tensor; black holes.

Allowed aids for final exam

Only three aids per student will be allowed in the final exam:

Aid	Restriction
Prof. Peet's lecture notes (etc.) from http://www.physics.utoronto.ca/~phy483f/	all material must be entirely contained within the ~/phy483f/ directory on the UofT Physics web server and authored by Prof. Peet in English
Your own handwritten notes	in any language
Carroll textbook	in English

This list of three allowed aids is exhaustive. It will be strictly enforced, by the professor and by other exam invigilators. This policy exists in order to make the playing field level for all students in the course. Thank you for your co-operation and understanding.

Examples of disallowed aids

Items which had to be confiscated last year included:-

electronic devices
(laptops, calculators, cell phones, PDAs, ...)
non-Carroll GR/GR-related textbooks
(whether on reserve for this course or not)
notes from other UofT professors' courses
(this includes any other GR course at UofT, undergraduate or graduate, whether the notes are authored by you or someone else, and applies to all three campuses)
any material from the web apart from this semester's course web hub
(e.g. answers to GR HW/exam questions from UCSB...!)

N.B.: The above list of disallowed items is not exhaustive. Also, any confiscated item can be returned to its owner only after the entire exam is officially and fully over. Interim security is at your own risk; the prof. and invigilators are not responsible for your personal belongings. Thank you for your co-operation and understanding.

Practice exam questions

Note: old final exam question papers are probably not available from years prior to 2004. The reason is that the prof. who taught GR for many years prior to 2004 did not hold written final exams - he quizzed students face-to-face individually instead.

From last year

Preamble to 2004 exam: Front page , Back page (includes formulae given) .

Question	focus
Q1 from 2004 exam	(geodesics)
Q2: solved in notes of 2005-10-21	(curvature)
Q3 from 2004 exam	(special relativity)
Q4 from 2004 exam	(energy-momentum tensor)
Q5 from 2004 exam	(black holes)
Q6 from 2004 exam	(index gymnastics / Einstein equation)

Notes:

You have now been taught the techniques necessary to solve the 2004 exam, except Q3(c) [surface gravity is covered in lecture of 2005-12-02, or see Carroll section 6.3].
Last year's exam was rather too hard, and this year's exam will be notably easier!