A Short Course in General Relativity

by James Foster, J. David Nightingale

Suitable for a one-semester course in general relativity for senior undergraduates or beginning graduate students, this text clarifies the mathematical aspects of Einstein's theory of relativity without sacrificing physical understanding.

Genres: Physics, Science, Textbooks

302 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

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Reviews

[Erik · Rating 4 out of 5]

My year of science reading got off to a slow start thanks to two articles (or is it three) that I had to write first. I can feel that real estate opening up in my brain and what better to fill it with than science! So for this year long review, I am starting with the subject that originally fascinated me in high school: relativity. This text is an excellent place to begin for those who eventually want to try and crack the Wheeler, Thorne, Meisner volume on gravitation. It is for first yr grad students and is very visual and clear. This is not the book for philosophical questions about spacetime, just a head start on the needed vocabulary to ask those questions. I followed things up through parallel transport, geodesic deviation and curvature. I finally was bothered about never really understanding what a metric tensor is, so I stopped and changed books. Now I've finished and this is a sweet little volume indeed, taking you up to the Schwarzschild solution and gravitational radiation. I would recommend doing McMahon's demystified and Schutz's First Course in GR before this.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Please note that this review is of the first edition (1979) rather than the second (1995) or the third and latest edition (2010).

This is the best book I have yet found for the non-specialist reader to quickly gain a reasonably deep understanding of the mathematics of general relativity. It will be no surprise that you will need some basic knowledge of algebra and calculus, and be prepared to do some work, and to look up a few things in Wikipedia (for me, it was Poisson's equation which I had not encountered before).

The clue is in the title: it is a short book (192 pages), in marked contrast to the beautiful and monumental "Gravitation" by Misner, Thorne and Wheeler (1973) Gravitation , a very heavy 1279 pages which I have not got very far into yet (though I intend to).

I had previously tried Bernard Schutz's "First Course in General Relativity" A First Course in General Relativity , but got stuck. I got along better with this shorter work. It gets to the point really quickly.

My only gripe is that it would have been helpful if the book included answers to the exercises.

[Chandra Prakash · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is by far the best book ever on General Theory of Relativity, for begginers, I does involve some messy calculations but at least does not involve any weird symbols that breaks your motivation. This book does not contain any topic regarding Special Theory of Relativity, But has everything else to cover GTR. Very Nice Introduction to manifolds and Tensors. Even has some easy to intermediate level problems to master the basic. My advice would be to just use this book to get an overview of the topic then move to any other book on GTR by Wald, or Weinberg, or Kip Thorne or Sean Carroll.