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General Relativity: An Introduction for Physicists
After reviewing the basic concept of general relativity, this introduction discusses its mathematical background, including the necessary tools of tensor calculus and differential geometry. These tools are used to develop the topic of special relativity and to discuss electromagnetism in Minkowski spacetime. Gravitation as spacetime curvature is introduced and the field equations of general relativity derived. After applying the theory to a wide range of physical situations, the book concludes with a brief discussion of classical field theory and the derivation of general relativity from a variational principle.
592 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 4, 2002
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 10, 2016
This book is a very great book in my opinion except one thing: the signature of the metric. It would be excellent if the text uses the (-+++) signature instead of (+---) signature. The reason is because this book is at the introductory level above Schutz's First Course in GR but below Carroll or Wald's GR texts, thus signature difference is at best confusing. When the practitioner is more expert in the field (e.g. used to working in spinors etc. with different signatures for simplicity), this signature convention does not matter.
This book's main selling point is explicit computation, including explicitly showing all the G and c (which are set to 1 in most texts for clarity). Therefore this book is extremely useful for checking calculations and verify understanding. In fact, this text is about more than 50% thicker than Schutz with almost the same "main points" (except that here they expound more on variational principles and Reissner-Nordstrom/Kerr geometry) because all calculations are done explicitly. The chapter on experimental tests and calculations of trajectories are valuable. Most importantly, the chapter on linearized gravity is done explicitly and this is extremely useful, as to my knowledge many (if not most) texts do not treat these things as clearly as here (especially explaining the use of Green's function!).
In this sense, this book can actually not be read as "learning source": one could go from Schutz, then Carroll or Weinberg or Wald directly while using this as intermediate "check-and-balance".
This book's main selling point is explicit computation, including explicitly showing all the G and c (which are set to 1 in most texts for clarity). Therefore this book is extremely useful for checking calculations and verify understanding. In fact, this text is about more than 50% thicker than Schutz with almost the same "main points" (except that here they expound more on variational principles and Reissner-Nordstrom/Kerr geometry) because all calculations are done explicitly. The chapter on experimental tests and calculations of trajectories are valuable. Most importantly, the chapter on linearized gravity is done explicitly and this is extremely useful, as to my knowledge many (if not most) texts do not treat these things as clearly as here (especially explaining the use of Green's function!).
In this sense, this book can actually not be read as "learning source": one could go from Schutz, then Carroll or Weinberg or Wald directly while using this as intermediate "check-and-balance".
March 14, 2017
An excellent introduction to General Relativity
August 30, 2019
This textbook provides a clear and lucid explanation of concepts, while balancing mathematical rigour with physical intuition. Recommended to be read after Schutz's book and alongside Caroll's.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews