Customer Reviews

Gravitation and Cosmology: Principles and Applications of the General Theory of Relativity

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After a completing graduate school, I decided it was time to learn GR on my own. I got Weinberg's book, and, at first reading, I was put off by it--there are effectively no diagrams, no problems, and no pedagogy. So on to Misner, Thorne, Wheeler. Well these kings have no clothes: MTW contains almost no clean, declarative sentences and could be reduced to 1/4 its size with straightforward editing. So I bought B. F. Schutz's book read it, and and went back to Weinberg's book. With both in hand, I am acquiring a satisfying understanding of GR. And I now realize that Weinberg's book is a masterpiece. As in all his texts, Weinberg's passion is to expose the underlying logic of the physics. All follows from the Equivalnce Princple, and this view gives his book a logic coherency that other's lack. (Try seeing where the Equivalence principle fits in Schutz's presentation.) One criticism: I believe that Weinberg was writing a text for his peers to set them straight about GR; he neglected students. It would have been great if he could have included a mathematical appendix or two to make the text more accessible. But even so, it is a wonderful book.

I greatly appreciated this book when I was a student. The tensor analysis is very carefully explained; in addition, you really get a basic physics understanding. The equivalence principle and Mach-Einstein theories discussions are simply wonderful. Of course, some experimental data are too old now to be taken seriously.

This is one of the finest GR books that is written for a physicist. Although it is slightly dated, it can still be profitably used today to learn the foundations of the subject that no other contemporary text has explained so clearly.

There is a strong emphasis on the equivalence principle in the book, and many interesting illustrations of this principle can be found throughout the book. There's no discussion of black holes, of course, since the book hasn't probably been revised since its publication in the early seventies. However, Weinberg's book can be truly judged based on the brilliant presentation of the physical ideas of GR in a way that is so familiar to the physicist. A mathematically minded physicist who cares little about real physical insights will be obviously disappointed by this book.

Weinberg is a master. His style is efficent. His words not wasted. His insights are inspiring. Behind each statement dwells a reservoir of thought. His selection and organization of the material seems non-improvable. Completion of the book yields general relativity in a comprehensive manner.

In addition to his methods, I am wholeheartedly biased towards his approach of basing general relativity on empiricism rather than geometry. Reading this book is almost synonomous with sitting at the feet of a master.

The methods utilized are standard tensor analysis, which yields the best results and understanding of the physics in a first exposure. MTW, in contrast, uses different mathematical approaches and moreover does so in an inconsistent manner. Weinberg is the BEST book, existing today, on general relativity period.

I used this book in a class taught by its author. That makes it hard to disentangle the experience of taking the class from the book itself. However, I found this far more readable that Misner, Thorne, & Wheeler's ponderous tome. As enjoyable as I found Taylor & Wheeler's Spacetime Physics (written in a similar style), MTW is leaden in contrast to Weinberg's text. I had no problem with the notation: the rules for manipulating indices are quite straightforward and easy to apply. Furthermore, this is the notation used in a variety of other applications of tensors, from electrodynamics to mechanics (stress and moment of inertia tensors), so get used to it. As other reviewers have observed, one cannot help but think that MTW could have been edited down considerably; Weinberg's book is much tighter.

Steven Weinberg wrote the best book on general relativity in history. A Nobel Laureate, he has pioneered both in relativity and quantum theory. Readers who want to know more about him should read T. Cao's 1997 book (Cao is at Boston University) on quantum field theory, from which Weinberg emerges as probably the greatest quantum theorist in history. Unlike most quantum theorists, even the founders of quantum theory, Weinberg was the first to find errors in his own and others' theories, to modify them rapidly and ingeniously, and to establish the newest trends and ideas in each decade since the early years. He founded the latest quantum field theory school, effective gauge field theory, although he became disgusted with field theory's errors and went over to string theory (which seems to be at most an approximation to the real world). In general relativity, he resembles Sir Arthur Eddington in combining algebraic techniques with general relativity (e.g., those of Weyl) and in emphasizing the underlying principles - equivalence, the tetrad formalism, covariance, and even gravitational waves which are only now being tested by Project Ligo. The only book which comes near to Weinberg's on general relativity is the one by Meisner, Wheeler, and Thorne of the early 1970s, and it requires expertise in graduate geometry and is neither as concise nor as inspired and insightful as Weinberg's.

Of course this is a great book. You can start at the first page and proceed right to the last without discontinuities, in an orderly, organized way. You will then have learned a huge amount of the gravity lore, physically oriented, as opposed to mathematically. Also, you'll have tensor calculus at your feet, in the traditional formulation, the one that Einstein used, as well as most of us. Once you have the great picture, you could learn Cartan mathematics, which greatly reduces calculation times. For this, Wheeler's "Gravitation" is recommended. Follow this sequence, by all means. Not the opposite!

This is to alert the reader to the fact that Amazon is mistakenly attributing this book to the wrong writer. The author of this early work, "Gravitation and Cosmology," was, of course, Steven Weinberg (no middle initial), who is also the author of the recent "Cosmology," and the three-volume treatise on "The Quantum Theory of Fields," as well as several books for the general reader.

Weinberg made waves when he wrote a book claiming the relationship between GR and geometry to be a coincidence of the mathematics. But by abandoning the geometrical interpretation, we lose all intuition for the ugly, ugly equations that dominate the subject. His cursory, dismissive mention of black holes is unforgivable, and revealing of how dated a text this is. Get a copy of Schutz instead.

There was a time when this book was probably very authoritative and useful (though I can't see myself preferring it over Hawking and Ellis, even then). Put it out of your mind: that time is gone. There are a slew of much better, much more modern books out there. Furthermore, this book is written from a perspective that attempts to filter a huge chunk of the geometry out of G.R., sullying a lot of the beauty of Einstein's central idea. If you are interested in cosmology, you can do a lot better looking at Hawking and Ellis, or one of the more recent books that will, due to their newness, emphasize the numerous advances in cosmology since the 70s. If you are interested in Relativity, PLEASE look at Schutze (beginner) or at Wald (graduate). Don't waste time and energy on this book.

That being said, there are some interesting advanced topics here, and a few things that I haven't seen elsewhere. This can be a useful reference for a researching relativist.