Overview

General Relativity (GR) is arguably considered as the most elegant theory in physics. GR pronounces gravitation as the manifestation of space-time geometry. GR has been extremely successful at describing observations and passed all experimental tests conducted so far. GR based cosmology is the cornerstone of the current hot Big Bang description of our Universe. However, some unexpected components turn out to make up most of the Universe's mass-energy budget in the GR description of the observations at large scales. Recent cosmological observations suggest that the Universe is undergoing a phase of accelerated expansion. The explanation of such accelerated expansion in the purview of general relativity requires the presence of a large amount of some exotic form of energy density with negative pressure, the so-called dark energy. On the other hand, the amount of luminous matter in galaxies is found insufficient to explain the observed galactic rotation curves and thereby the existence of non-luminous or dark matter, that neither interacts with radiation nor with the conventional matter except through the gravitational field or through some feeble interaction, has to be assumed. This dark matter component is also required to be non-relativistic (i.e. cold) in view of structure formation. It appears from a wide variety of astrophysical observations that ordinary baryonic matter constitutes just 4.9% of the energy density in the Universe while dark matter composes about 26.8% and the dark energy contributes most - about 68.3% of the energy density in the Universe. The journey of exploring the laws of nature had crossed a milestone when Nicolus Copernicus predicted the actual planetary motion and his student Galileo Galilei proved his teacher's prediction by his revolutionary discovery of Telescope. The laws of planetary motion by Johannes Kepler, created a perception about motion inside the solar system which was given a proper and generalized dimension by Isac Newton with his revolutionary Theory of Gravitation [2]. The invention of the telescope and the theory of Gravitation explored the gateway of gathering knowledge about the phenomena not only beyond the Earth but beyond the solar system also.

Full Product Details

9782991723557

Table of Contents

Reviews

Author Information

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available