# What is linearized GR?

1. Feb 16, 2012

### waterfall

https://www.amazon.com/Gravitation-...hanian/dp/0393965015/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top

How many here own this book by Ohanian & Ruffini "Gravitation and Spacetime"?

A review mentions:

"Ohanian introduces linearized GR (in a completely logical and satisfying manner) before Riemannian geometry"

What's linearized GR?

I already own 10 GR books. What's so unique with Ohanian's that I must get one?

Last edited by a moderator: May 5, 2017
2. Feb 16, 2012

### elfmotat

Linearized gravity is just using perturbations of flat spacetime to approximate the metric:

$g_{\mu \nu }=\eta _{\mu \nu }+h_{\mu \nu }$

I've never seen a GR book that doesn't have some mention of linearized GR.

3. Feb 16, 2012

### Bill_K

I have a copy of Ohanian and have taught out of it. It's a gentle introduction, Ok as a first book but I wouldn't recommend it beyond that.

4. Feb 16, 2012

### waterfall

Is it possible to do perturbations of newtonian spacetime to approximate both the minkowski metric in SR and lorentzian metric in GR?

What if our universe space time were really newtonian and Spacetime (tm) is just some kind of Higgs-like field that create all those SR and GR effects. Is this possible?