This year-long course will be following the unpublished textbook by Roger Blandford and Kip Thorne, included below. First term will cover chapters 2 through 10 which will, broadly speaking, include special relativity, statistical physics, and optics. In the winter term the next eight chapters (11 through 18) will be covered, studying elasticity, fluid mechanics and magneothydrodynamics. The spring term will cover the final nine chapters (19 through 27), including plasma physics and general relativity & cosmology.
The course description will be found here. The course is pass-fail and letter grades will be given by petition only. You can also read the preface to the text to learn more about the philosophy of the course and the topics to be covered.
Below are links to the current version of the textbook for this course, which is authored by Roger Blandford and Kip Thorne. This textbook can be freely used by students taking the course. People not taking the course are free to download a single copy of the textbook for personal use, but duplication of additional copies and distribution to others besides the downloading person require the express consent of the authors. Please send errata and suggestions for improvements to kip@caltech.edu.
Blandford and Thorne are currently working on a near-final revision of the textbook. The version "10..." of each chapter, below, is the old, semi-final version . The near-final version is numbered "11...". Homework problems will be drawn from the new "11..." version of each chapter, so do not rely on the earlier version when working on the problems.
Yanbei will provide a homework assignment, at a link below, on the Wednesday evening that he finishes lecturing about that assignment's chapter. The students' solutions must be turned in at the beginning of the following Wednesday class (the link's indicated due date). Solutions prepared by TAs will be provided at a link below soon after the class at which the students' solutions are turned in. See the course description for further detail.