Gravity in the Quantum World and the Cosmos

Greetings from sunny Palo Alto, California, where we're having the 2005 incarnation of the SLAC Summer Institute, Gravity in the Quantum World and the Cosmos. It's an annual two-week school, aimed primarily at graduate students in physics, covering topics of interest to SLAC (the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center). Until recently, gravity didn't qualify as something of interest to anyone working at a particle accelerator, but times have changed -- gravity was the subject of SSI in 1998, and again this year. These days, considerations of dark energy, extra dimensions, and string theory are of direct interest to particle physicists. I got to speak first, giving a three-hour General Relativity Primer. For lecture notes, we handed out my No-Nonsense Introduction to General Relativity that's been on the web for a while; the online transparencies were scanned in from the actual lectures I gave. The idea was to give a complete intro ...