Gravity

Hartle believes that the general theory of relativity should be a part of the university science curriculum. He hopes to remove a gap in the knowledge of undergraduate students, so they can better understand how scientific theory and observation are connected. Hartle illustrates his book by discussing the exciting phenomena that have been discovered by those who have dedicated their lives to learning about gravity. For example, he uses the Global Positioning System satellites, black holes, X-ray sources, pulsars, quasars, gravitational waves, the Big Bang (a cosmological event), and large-scale structures in the universe to illustrate his point about how general relativity explains an array of everyday and exotic phenomena.