Customer Reviews

General Relativity, Astrophysics, and Cosmology (Astronomy and Astrophysics Library)

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This book is extraordinary; every general relativist and graduate student should have one. General relativity is a difficult subject, and like other difficult subjects (quantum field theory, topos theory, for example) you cannot expect to learn everything from one book.

This is an intermediate-level text that expects that you have had (at least) some exposure to Riemannian geometry and special relativity.

If you are just beginning to learn general relativity I recommend that you begin with Schutz's A First Course in General Relativity, and if you do not know any Riemannian geometry, I recommend that you read Frank Morgan's Riemannian Geometry: A Beginners Guide, Second Edition.

This book, however, is invaluable. It contains a serious but intuitive description of the relationship between general relativity and Newtonian gravity. Personally, I found this to be the best explanation I have ever seen. This book also contains a chapter on the Scharzschild metric is a godsend; everything is worked out in detail and explained beautifully.

This book also contains brief but very insightful descriptions of black holes, black hole thermodynamics, and cosmology.

This book will make reading MTW Gravitation (Physics Series), Wald General Relativity, Poisson A Relativist's Toolkit: The Mathematics of Black-Hole Mechanics, Weinberg Cosmology, and other GR texts much easier.

For whom was this book written? If you don't know tensor analysis, GR and the rest of that stuff you're sure not going to learn it here. If you do know tensor analysis and the other stuff why are you reading this book?