Why General Relativity?

• What about gravity?
• Tower of Pisa equivalence principle revisited
• rocket experiment: light bending!
  demo movie! (mpeg)
• rocket experiment: time warp!

Relativity Resources Online

• beautiful discussion of the light cone and an especially nice animation of the rocket experiment
• another very nice relativity site with good animations

Relativistic Gravity: Light Bending

• basic idea
• The first test: bending of starlight by the Sun; reaction at the time
• Examples of gravitational lensing
  • source-lens-observer aligned: Einstein rings
  • misaligned: Einstein cross

Gravitational Microlensing and Milky Way Dark Matter

• Microlensing: theory
  lightcurve animation
• Microlensing: experiments
  • LMC search fields
  • MACHO LMC events: images, lightcurves,
  • a binary source event towards the LMC
• direct detection of a microlens
• Implications for dark matter: Circa 2001, 2003

Gravitational Lensing and Dark Matter in External Galaxies

• gallery of lensing by individual galaxies
• lensing by clusters of galaxies:
  Abell 1689, Abell 2218, 0024+1654, Abell 370 , SDSS J1004+4112
• the bullet cluster and dark matter