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Gravitation
This landmark text offers a rigorous full-year graduate level course on gravitation physics, teaching students
• Grasp the laws of physics in flat spacetime
• Predict orders of magnitude
• Calculate using the principal tools of modern geometry
• Predict all levels of precision
• Understand Einstein's geometric framework for physics
• Explore applications, including pulsars and neutron stars, cosmology, the Schwarzschild geometry and gravitational collapse, and gravitational waves
• Probe experimental tests of Einstein's theory
• Tackle advanced topics such as superspace and quantum geometrodynamics
The book offers a unique, alternating two-track pathway through the
• In many chapters, material focusing on basic physical ideas is designated as
Track 1 . These sections together make an appropriate one-term advanced/graduate level course (mathematical vector analysis and simple partial-differential equations). The book is printed to make it easy for readers to identify these sections.
• The remaining Track 2 material provides a wealth of advanced topics instructors can draw from to flesh out a two-term course, with Track 1 sections serving as prerequisites.
• Grasp the laws of physics in flat spacetime
• Predict orders of magnitude
• Calculate using the principal tools of modern geometry
• Predict all levels of precision
• Understand Einstein's geometric framework for physics
• Explore applications, including pulsars and neutron stars, cosmology, the Schwarzschild geometry and gravitational collapse, and gravitational waves
• Probe experimental tests of Einstein's theory
• Tackle advanced topics such as superspace and quantum geometrodynamics
The book offers a unique, alternating two-track pathway through the
• In many chapters, material focusing on basic physical ideas is designated as
Track 1 . These sections together make an appropriate one-term advanced/graduate level course (mathematical vector analysis and simple partial-differential equations). The book is printed to make it easy for readers to identify these sections.
• The remaining Track 2 material provides a wealth of advanced topics instructors can draw from to flesh out a two-term course, with Track 1 sections serving as prerequisites.
1279 pages, Paperback
First published September 15, 1973
135 people are currently reading
4150 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 38 reviews
September 23, 2014
Look. I don't want to whine or anything, but how come the evolutionary biologists get all the attention when the religious right express opinions on science? Why isn't there a massive campaign to make sure that books like this one get sold with a prominent sticker on the front saying "Gravitation's Just A Theory"? It is, you know. Most schoolchildren don't as much as get told that Intelligent Falling exists, let alone giving it equal air time. And, unless I'm greatly mistaken, there's hardly anyone even trying to address the problem.
The rest of this review is available elsewhere (the location cannot be given for Goodreads policy reasons)
The rest of this review is available elsewhere (the location cannot be given for Goodreads policy reasons)
November 11, 2013
I read this when I was twelve and made my own models of tensors out of egg boxes. My mother says she still has them up in the loft.
May 27, 2009
This shit is a long-ass beautiful poem.
April 18, 2008
This is high up on my list of favorite general relativity books, very possibly number one. The book is thick enough to make its own substantial dent in spacetime, but you'd look in vain for a wasted page. It offers two interwoven tracks: One holds your hand through a carefully detailed development of GR and related mathematics, covering all the points necessary for an understanding the later advanced, topical chapters. The other skims the waves, covering only what you need for a quick course in GR. Either track is both readable and thorough, sprinkled liberally with optional sections that offer more mathematical detail, and occasional sidebars on history, people, and other points of interest. For anyone who wants to learn GR, it is impossible to recommend this book to highly.
June 25, 2020
finally ordered a copy. i figure if i'm stuck in texas for another 9 months, i might as well learn why i hit the ground when i pass out.
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This is supposedly The Book regarding that tricky fourth force and the framework of General Relativity, and thus I need to man-up and read it at some point. Beyond it lies...?
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This is supposedly The Book regarding that tricky fourth force and the framework of General Relativity, and thus I need to man-up and read it at some point. Beyond it lies...?
March 14, 2012
This is my favorite book from years now. I've pondered pregeometry as a basic idea ever since with or without metric as topological source of partition categories and fabric of possibilities to exist. We should build QM and GR on pregeometry of multiverse.
It's all about measuring on manifoulds and curvature forms, purely mathematical and strongly physical. The book is highly intuitive, easy to learn and worth of reading even several times.
If the book will be rewritten to morrow, it should be equipped with fourth layer of reading with modern computer animations. Then it would be a General relativity cookbook from teens to 80-teens.
It's all about measuring on manifoulds and curvature forms, purely mathematical and strongly physical. The book is highly intuitive, easy to learn and worth of reading even several times.
If the book will be rewritten to morrow, it should be equipped with fourth layer of reading with modern computer animations. Then it would be a General relativity cookbook from teens to 80-teens.
December 28, 2019
I'm a little bit uncomfortable saying that I have read this book when you could be your entire life reading it... (I haven't read all the chapters and boxes with the same intensity). It's a masterpiece, that's for sure. You can learn a lot from it. The explanations of the math are very "physics oriented", which it is good, at least from my point of view. Curiously, it has a dated part: the area theorems of black holes; it does not have the more recent Hawking's results that combine GR with QM. Overall, it's really recomendable if you are serious about learning GR.
March 16, 2021
This book is maddening. It's got fantastic visual pedagogy that helps illustrate formal geometric concepts like covariant derivatives, affine connections, and curvature. The tone is often refreshingly casual and the authors take their time. The trouble is you can’t fit the fucker in the trunk of your car let alone a backpack. You seriously cannot lift this fucking thing.
March 12, 2008
I learned a lot - it's sort of like General Relativity for Dummies in the sense that it actually gives examples... most texts don't. I also learned why they call this tome "The Phonebook"; it's big.
March 10, 2015
Between the submission, the fear or the abandonment
Want to read
August 2, 2011From http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/14/sci...
"In 1973, Dr. Wheeler and two former students, Dr. Misner and Kip Thorne, of the California Institute of Technology, published “Gravitation,” a 1,279-page book whose witty style and accessibility — it is chockablock with sidebars and personality sketches of physicists — belies its heft and weighty subject. It has never been out of print."
"In 1973, Dr. Wheeler and two former students, Dr. Misner and Kip Thorne, of the California Institute of Technology, published “Gravitation,” a 1,279-page book whose witty style and accessibility — it is chockablock with sidebars and personality sketches of physicists — belies its heft and weighty subject. It has never been out of print."
May 13, 2011
The jewel of texts on classical relativity. It is massive, it is a common joke among physics students that it "illustrates its topic by its weight." It is also the authoritative text on the classical topic; most modern texts take examples and expositions directly from it. Every student of relativity loves this text for its clarity and completeness.
August 23, 2025
Excellent but annoying.
For background: I read Thorne's Black Holes and Time Warps when I was in high school and I studied general relativity in college as a required course.
I have such mixed feeling for this book. The information it presents is pretty good but it fails at explanation and exploration. Because the authors refuse to write one line of code, the only worked out examples are trivial systems. They insist on analytic solutions so it's one neutron star after another. How about an earth moon system? Nope such an example is simultaneously beneath them and also too hard to analytically "solve".
Learning from this book is a sisyphian task. They go from 0 to speculative grad paper in just a couple chapters. The book purports to have several "tracks" you can follow but even the basic track is riddled with meanderings and assumptions. If I were to write a textbook, a book students are meant to learn from, I would spend more than 1 page and 1 table explaining a notation system used (and misused) throughout the rest of the book. But that's just me.
See, the thing is, the Einstein field equation is simple. It relates one quantity - the curvature of spacetime - to another - the momentum of stress energy in that spacetime. Throw in some special relativity to muddle everything and you have a General Relativity book. Like 3 chapters. The rest should be worked out examples. Instead, this book is 30 chapters, 25 of which are old grad school papers the authors refuse to let go. One of the powers of their ridiculous notation is its coordinate system free - you can use the mathematics in whatever coordinate system you want. So which wild and weird coordinate systems do they use? Spherical. That's it. Full stop. Schwarzchild should be getting royalty checks.
The good: Nice typography. They mostly know what they're talking about. (Yes, I can say "mostly" because they'll admit that most of the gray marked chapters are still being studied.) Looks great on a bookshelf.
The bad: Terrible and inconsistent notation (all GR is like this, but I had hoped these authors would care more especially in this computer age). Terrible topic selection. No use of computers or discussion of numerical solutions. No derivations in interesting coordinate systems. No discussion of sources of energy or density. Basically no discussion of dynamics aside from `t` showing up in a lot of equations.
Have you ever read the book Structure and Interpretation of Mechanical Systems? No? Go read it. It takes a simple subject, Newtonian physics, explains it using stationary action, and uses a notation so rigorous you can (and are supposed to) directly translate the mathematics to simulations. The field of GR would be blessed by such a book. This is not that book. This book is its antithesis.
One more good: you are given a real sense of accomplishment even after finishing just the easy track. You don't learn much, but it feels like you have.
For background: I read Thorne's Black Holes and Time Warps when I was in high school and I studied general relativity in college as a required course.
I have such mixed feeling for this book. The information it presents is pretty good but it fails at explanation and exploration. Because the authors refuse to write one line of code, the only worked out examples are trivial systems. They insist on analytic solutions so it's one neutron star after another. How about an earth moon system? Nope such an example is simultaneously beneath them and also too hard to analytically "solve".
Learning from this book is a sisyphian task. They go from 0 to speculative grad paper in just a couple chapters. The book purports to have several "tracks" you can follow but even the basic track is riddled with meanderings and assumptions. If I were to write a textbook, a book students are meant to learn from, I would spend more than 1 page and 1 table explaining a notation system used (and misused) throughout the rest of the book. But that's just me.
See, the thing is, the Einstein field equation is simple. It relates one quantity - the curvature of spacetime - to another - the momentum of stress energy in that spacetime. Throw in some special relativity to muddle everything and you have a General Relativity book. Like 3 chapters. The rest should be worked out examples. Instead, this book is 30 chapters, 25 of which are old grad school papers the authors refuse to let go. One of the powers of their ridiculous notation is its coordinate system free - you can use the mathematics in whatever coordinate system you want. So which wild and weird coordinate systems do they use? Spherical. That's it. Full stop. Schwarzchild should be getting royalty checks.
The good: Nice typography. They mostly know what they're talking about. (Yes, I can say "mostly" because they'll admit that most of the gray marked chapters are still being studied.) Looks great on a bookshelf.
The bad: Terrible and inconsistent notation (all GR is like this, but I had hoped these authors would care more especially in this computer age). Terrible topic selection. No use of computers or discussion of numerical solutions. No derivations in interesting coordinate systems. No discussion of sources of energy or density. Basically no discussion of dynamics aside from `t` showing up in a lot of equations.
Have you ever read the book Structure and Interpretation of Mechanical Systems? No? Go read it. It takes a simple subject, Newtonian physics, explains it using stationary action, and uses a notation so rigorous you can (and are supposed to) directly translate the mathematics to simulations. The field of GR would be blessed by such a book. This is not that book. This book is its antithesis.
One more good: you are given a real sense of accomplishment even after finishing just the easy track. You don't learn much, but it feels like you have.
January 29, 2023
A daunting looking book, but once you break it down into appropriate sections it makes for a very understandable presentation of general relativity, and motivates it well. The question lingers as to how much this theoretical scaffolding is really open to empirical testing, given that general relativity basically defines geodesic motion in such a way as to make departures from it hard to even countenance. Yet, as a practical tool for measurements and as a theoretical system, it is actually motivated all by quite a simple principle that can be enunciated in just a sentence or two, namely that: We presume local Lorentzian flatness to space and time and measure geodesic deviation relative to this to establish a more accurate geodesic globally throughout the manifold based on the distorting effects of gravitation.
The book has plenty of mathematics in it, but it also has plenty of informative diagrams and boxes which often repeat over the information. Also, for every section basically, the motivation for the relevant equations and the outcome of them is also explained in plain words. There is a great account of the historical development hidden amongst it also, with some relevant quotes from pivotal figures along the way, such as Newton, Einstein, Penrose, Hawking and Dicke. I found this to be a slightly easier to follow, logical development than I found in Penrose, Road to Reality, although I now have extra appreciation for that also, and will probably revisit that book. The basic operational significance and use of general relativity is more in plain sight, rather than hidden behind some slight mystifications around entities such as complex numbers.
The book has plenty of mathematics in it, but it also has plenty of informative diagrams and boxes which often repeat over the information. Also, for every section basically, the motivation for the relevant equations and the outcome of them is also explained in plain words. There is a great account of the historical development hidden amongst it also, with some relevant quotes from pivotal figures along the way, such as Newton, Einstein, Penrose, Hawking and Dicke. I found this to be a slightly easier to follow, logical development than I found in Penrose, Road to Reality, although I now have extra appreciation for that also, and will probably revisit that book. The basic operational significance and use of general relativity is more in plain sight, rather than hidden behind some slight mystifications around entities such as complex numbers.
November 27, 2023
The grade given is mainly based on my experience as a bachelor and Phd student.
I really don't understand why someone should choose this book as a reference when there are a lot of better alternatives on the market.
Do you want a good, simple and very clear introduction to the subject? Choose Carroll.
Do you want a formal, precise and exaustive book with well written and understandable (for a physicist) mathematical review of GR? Choose Wald.
Do you want a hard yet enlighting overview? Choose Weinberg.
Do you want all three? Buy them all, you will still spend less than buying Gravitation.
The review is based on my vision of the book. I deeply respect the authors and I know very well that I will never be a physicist like them even if I lived a thousand years. Despite this, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.
I really don't understand why someone should choose this book as a reference when there are a lot of better alternatives on the market.
Do you want a good, simple and very clear introduction to the subject? Choose Carroll.
Do you want a formal, precise and exaustive book with well written and understandable (for a physicist) mathematical review of GR? Choose Wald.
Do you want a hard yet enlighting overview? Choose Weinberg.
Do you want all three? Buy them all, you will still spend less than buying Gravitation.
The review is based on my vision of the book. I deeply respect the authors and I know very well that I will never be a physicist like them even if I lived a thousand years. Despite this, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.
July 30, 2017
I originally read Gravitation shortly after it came out. It was a good read and primer then although I think it might be a bit dated now (more recent research/discoveries). However, as a read for someone considering the field and not afraid of a little work, a good read.
July 22, 2017
The cover art itself is worth giving the book a read!
June 13, 2018
A spinor is a flag and a pole. I'll remember that forever.
February 10, 2021
Great book with almost all aspects being covered. Big one.
January 15, 2022
Best book ever written about Gravity.
April 28, 2023
amazingly readable
August 11, 2023
beautiful
Read
September 2, 2023Just took a look at , terrific
July 12, 2024
The best book of relativity by far. No analogies, no bs. Just math.
September 1, 2025
DID NOT READ!!!
READ: Gravitation by MissAmphetamine
READ: Gravitation by MissAmphetamine
December 17, 2022
Great Book, a must read for anyone interested in anything relativity! Got it signed by Thorne himself at a Caltech Pizza Course!
September 17, 2025
I got this book originally because it is a classic which looks pretty on a bookshelf.
But more and more, I find myself consulting these masters from the general relativistic days of yore and find great wisdom in their detailed explanations of gravitational phenomena. Although I have not read every page of this massive tome (a good tofu press, too, by the way), it has given me enough that I should make my gratitude public.
But more and more, I find myself consulting these masters from the general relativistic days of yore and find great wisdom in their detailed explanations of gravitational phenomena. Although I have not read every page of this massive tome (a good tofu press, too, by the way), it has given me enough that I should make my gratitude public.
July 21, 2008
The authority on relativity and projective geometry. Provides all the proofs you ever needed in an easy to follow format.
December 3, 2008
Textbook. Heavy.
Read
August 3, 2011Not a great teaching book, but a classic that should be on everyone's bookshelf as a reference.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 38 reviews