General Relativity for the Gifted Amateur

by Tom Lancaster, Stephen Blundell

General relativity is one of the most profound statements in science. It is a theory of gravity that allows us to model the large-scale structure of the Universe, to understand and explain the motions and workings of stars, to reveal how gravity interacts with light waves and even how it hosts its own gravitational waves.

It is central to our notions of where the Universe comes from and what its eventual fate might be. For those wishing to learn physics, general relativity enjoys a dubious distinction. It is frequently viewed as a difficult theory, whose mastery is a rite of passage into the world of advanced physics and is described in an array of unforgiving, weighty textbooks aimed firmly at aspiring professionals.

Written by experimental physicists and aimed at providing the interested amateur with a bridge from undergraduate physics to general relativity, this book is designed to be different. The imagined reader is a gifted amateur possessing a curious and adaptable mind looking to be told an entertaining and intellectually stimulating story, but who will not feel patronised if a few mathematical niceties are spelled out in detail.

Using numerous worked examples, diagrams and careful physically motivated explanations, this book will smooth the path towards understanding the radically different and revolutionary view of the physical world that general relativity provides and which all physicists should have the opportunity to experience.

Genres: Physics

640 pages, Paperback

Published April 29, 2025

Reviews

[Susmit Islam · Rating 5 out of 5]

A relatively new text in the market, and I'd say pretty underrated as of yet. Very lucid, clearly develops the core of GR in about the first 300-ish pages, including SR, basics of Riemannian geometry, EFEs, the Schwarzschild solution, black holes, and cosmology. In the latter half the book delves deeper into modern differential geometry going deeper into manifolds, Lie theory, and differential forms , and then goes into the deeper stuff of general relativistic spacetime - inflation, gauge fields, gravitational waves and quantum gravity. It doesn't overwhelm you with the maths at the very beginning before going into any physics, nor does it simoly start by assuming that you know all the maths - simply choosing to introduce you to mathematical ideas on a need to know basis. And every chapter is loaded with plenty of examples to aid your understanding. Covering such a wide range of topics with the accompanying maths within about 600 pages means that something has to be cut off, and here that's a discussion of some of the more applied aspects of the theory, especially astrophysical phenomena. For them, I used Hartle. Overall, Hartle + Lancaster et al is going to be my go-to recommendation for serious beginners in the field of GR.