Chapter 1 tides: A tutorial

Abstract

These notes, from a course I gave at a CNRS school in Cargèse in March 2009, have the aim of quickly letting non-experts pick up a physical intuition and a sense of orders of magnitude in the theory of tides. 'Tides' include ocean tides as well as tidal effects in astronomy. The theory is illustrated by a variety of back-of-the-envelope problems, some of them surprising, all of them simple.