Recent content by Rob Woodside

It should be in Wald and more modern texts. Wald talks about the "peeling prperty" on pg 285, referencing Geroch and Penrose. MTW has a few other references on pg 1165. I'm going to get some more modern texts and somewhere recently I've seen a nice discussion pointing out that the peeling...

I think we are at the dawn of a new age of astronomy with gravitational radiation. We have indirect evidence with Einstein's quadrupole formula and the spin down of binary pulsars and appear very close to direct detection with Ligo. Beyond the weak field approximation, we have a lot of Ricci...

Check out Pais' biography of Einstein "Subtle is the Lord". I also noticed, but can't put my hands on a good review article posted at arXiv. I don't remember if Pais confirms this, but when Einstein first saw Weyl's unified theory (see Weyl's "Space Time Matter"), he was quite puzzled by it...

Some astronomers have some very weird ideas that are sometimes correct. However I balk at his assumption of a discrete time.

There is an old paperback by David Bohm called Relativity that developes Bondi's K-calculus (really just space-time diagrams) and worries about why the concepts of special relativity appear so strange at first sight. He talks about Piaget's experiments with developing children and points out...

The someone is Bekenstein, the guy who brought you "black hole thermodynamics" and a corrected version of this paper just appeared at arXiv. He makes a very favorable case for mond; but his relativistic version, while perhaps a good first stab, seems too complicated. It would be interesting to...

This may be the reason that Einstein initially doubted the existence of gravitational radiation. (Notice that the graviton is a hypothetical particle that could exist if the gravitational field quantized like the electromagnetic field. There is no evidence for this and classical gravitational...

2 nucleons; unless you are president of the US, then it is "nuculons"

You and Duff are the only people I have heard talk of "Stoney Units" and elsewhere you use them like Duff to argue a point. Some people have the benefit of a better education or maybe they are just brighter than me. Duff's paper was a revelation to me, unlike the paper you cited. You...

If you are seriously interested in general relativity, you cannot ignore astrophysics. There are lots of schools with people doing numerical relativity, exact solutions, quantum gravity, gravitational wave detection, etc. The math you want depends on your interests, from computer science to...

I had always considered "variable constants" to be without much experimental support and probably of only pedagogical interest. The Thompkins book shows what happens when constants are changed arbitrarily and incorrectly. Inserting a constant into a calculator and screwing up the exponent by a...

Thanks very much Pete. I found this and several others at arXiv by searching "accelerated charge". I'm putting together a collection of references for study in the new year. Amusingly Parrot Starts off by saying it is well accepted that accelerating charges in Minkowski space radiate and it...

Thanks Stingray. That's a cute idea, but I can begin to imagine the calculational difficulty. I'll have a look for Poisson's papers at arXiv.

How sweet, I wasn't aware of that. I have not heard of "asymptotic matching" could you please enlighten me? I am still worried about the inner boundary conditions near r=0, but no one else seems to be. It is tempting to think that a charged rotating black hole could be a model for an electron...

Not conserving photon number is something I have to look at. Their Gibbs free energy is zero, so the is no hindrance to their production or destruction. I can certainly see excavating them out of a quantum backgound as you accelerate through it. But I am not yet sure how this relates to this...