Table of Contents

Acknowledgement.- Preface.- Special Relativity: setting the stage.- Manifolds and fibre bundles.- Connections and Metrics.- Motion in the Schwarzschild Field.- Einstein versus Yang Mills Field Equations.- Stellar Equilibrium.- Gravitational Waves and the Binary Pulsars.- Conclusion of volume 1.- Appendix A: Spinors and Gamma Matrix Algebra.- Appendix B: Mathematica Packages.- Index.

About the Author

Pietro Fre is Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Torino, Italy and is currently serving as Scientific Counsellor of the Italian Embassy in Moscow. His scientific passion lies in supergravity and all allied topics, since the inception of the field, in 1976. He was professor at SISSA, worked in the USA and at CERN. He has taught General Relativity for 15 years. He has previously published two scientific monographs, "Supergravity and Superstrings" and "The N=2 Wonderland". He is also the author of a popular science book on cosmology ("Il fascino oscuro dell'inflazione", Springer 2009), and two novels, in Italian.