Customer Reviews

Introducing Einstein's Relativity

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This was one of the books assigned when I took general relativity in college. I found several of the chapters very enjoyable to read. D'Inverno does a great job getting into some of the fascinating physics that lies behind general relativity and its development, like Mach's principles and a great discussion of the equivalence principle. Much of the book is devoted to teaching you the mathematics, and it does so in a good fashion. He has two nice chapters on tensors with homework problems that are doable. One drawback was the book didn't have anything on Cartan's equations or discuss one forms (although he talks about contravariant and covariant vectors). The first half of the book is better than the second half, I found his chapters on special relativity excellent but felt his chapters on black holes and gravity waves were a bit lacking. In any case, I recommend it. Try beefing up your education by reading it along with Schutz so you get some exposure to one forms and all that.

D'Inverno provides a very solid introduction to the general theory of relativity, starting with a short review of the special theory and moving through tensor calculus, the field equations, and some applications. One caution: the approach is entirely coordinate-based, so people wishing to get a full picture of general relativity may wish to supplement it with a more modern treatment, such as Wald or Hawking and Ellis.

There are far too many books written on relativity, black holes and cosmology. Of these books, the best (e.g. Hawking and Ellis, Wald, Stewart) can be studied with minimal prerequisites and you should walk away with a good grasp of the issues, problems and results.

However if you want to have more than a coffee shop knowledge of relativity you should begin with something that provides examples and problems you can churn out yourself. D'Inverno provides these. He puts down no result that you can't check for yourself with nothing more than basic calculus and some intuition.

From this book you can then, after perhaps studying something beyond basic calculus, fruitfully study the above classics.

This is about the best introduction to General Relativity that
I've ever seen. It introduces just (and very clearly) all
the mathematical tools you need, clearly puts the basis of the
theory in the exposed formalism (tensor calculus) and then
applies it to quite a lot of interesting physical problems.
After a few missed starts, it was the book that really got me
into General Relativity ; once you've gone through it you wonder
why you were having difficulties before.

This is without any doubt the best book one can use for starting with GR: it is self contained, well written and moreover it is full of Physical insight. In brief: a great book. Even the introductory mathematical part (about tensor calculus) is great written: not too short and not too long. If one would like to gain an additional point of view about tensor calculus I'd recommend to compare the way followed by R. d'Inverno with that followed by Richtmyer "Principles of advanced mathematical Physics" vol 2 (the last all done in geodesic coordinates: this is a book on maths and not about GR!!). The level of Ray d'Inverno is at advanced undergraduate/1st year graduate: in fact one can find a lot of well discussed topics that are generally left out in other books on the subject. Of course this is not an advanced text like R. Wald or Hawking-Ellis, which are the right books if one wants to get a deeper insight in particular topics. The only fundamental thing R. d'Inverno lacks to treat in a fully way is the form of the Energy of the Gravitational field in GR and its related problems: no specific discussion about it. I think this is an important topic. A valuable (and probably the best) discussion about the latter can be found in L.D.Landau "Field Theory" book, or even in Sean Carroll "Spacetime and Geometry" book (a very good one, my favourite together with Landau and Ray d'Inverno), or you can also have a look about it into P. Dirac or Weinberg.

Of several of the books covering relativity theory and general
relativity in particular, this book is one of the best. I
consult it frequently. Benefits from buying this book: There are
numerous illustrations, the concepts are explained well, and
the organization of the material is good. Disadvantages: there
are no worked examples. I hope that one day that Schaums comes
out with a general relativity text in its "Outline Series" be-
cause worked examples are scarce in just about every general
relativity text. Since there is a Schaums outline on Tensor
calculus, I would recommend working on at least the first 8
chapters of that book before buying D'Invernos text. Tensor
calculus is a key to understanding general relativity, and there
is no better way to learn the subject than from David Kays
Schaum Outline on tensor calculus.

D'Inverno presents all the prerequisite maths needed for GR perfectly. The book is presented perfectly and at the appropriate introductory level for someone who has already done special relativity and wants to jump into GR but doesnt know what a tensor is. There definitly is no better introduction to GR in existence. The exercises at the end of each chapter are brilliant as well. Usually I dont do exercises as they take too long but D'Invernos exercises are a must do. You learn soo much from them and they are more easy than hard. Most books at this level give exercises which are too hard or not that important to understanding the next few chapters. But D'Invernos exercises are perfect especially the ones on the chapters about the maths needed for GR.
After introducing GR he does stuff on black holes, worm holes, gravitational waves and cosmology.

The only problems with the book are that in the first section of the book he does an introduction to special relativity for those who have never seen it before. It is a very bad intro to special relativity. For the best intro to special rel. one needs to consult "University Physics" by "Young and Fredman".
But for those who have already done SR, d'invernos intro to SR is new and interesting as a method if a bit too difficult and mathematical.
Also I would be a bit critical of the fact that after explaining the geometrical structure of GR perfectly he does not even mention how this view of gravity as a force is not exactly "combinable" with the particle physics view of gravity as a force communicated by a graviton. Just a small thought which I think is important. (Weinberg introduces GR by another method which does not use the mathematical geometrical structure throughout as he considers it "overemphasized" and a bit "misleading")
Wienbergs "General relativity and cosmology" should be the readers next port of call after D'inverno

Ray D'Inverno has introduced the topic in smooth logical manner. Basics such as K-Calculus are clearly written, furthermore there are answers to problems at the back of the books which are very helpful for beginners (not many books have this!), a lot of reference to other publications (excellent supplementary reading) are also supplied by the author. The only topic that need to be improved is on the tensor calculus section. Anyway this is worth buying.

Several years ago I tried to teach myself GR from this book. Although I could complete many of the exercises up to chapter 10, I eventually gave up.

Considering the book is entitled "Introducing...." I found it unnecessarily comprehensive and rigourous. There is a page on manifolds which I think is unnecessary. I had to read another book before I realised that Einstein was looking for a second order tensorial differential equation on the metric tensor analogous to the gravitational potential equation. This is really important; otherwise it is hard to understand why Einstein was doing what he was doing. D'Inverno never says "Here we refer to equation number so and so on page such 'n such." He just presumes you have completely absorbed the earlier sections. Introducing coordinate transformations, he writes x (bar) = f (x) where x is g(t), t being a "parameter", making everything more confusing than it needs to be.

Section after section and chapter after chapter follow each other. There was so much material that, being new to the subject, it was difficult to tell the wood from the trees.

I found errors, mainly trivial, on pages 59, 83, 89, 90, 108, 109, 362 and 363. I have the 1993 reprint.

Prof. D'Inverno was in the Dept of Maths, so I guess this explains the rigour.

I did learn a lot from this book so that when I tried Lillian Lieber's book some years later, I was able to whizz through it.

With a good teacher to help you, to tell you what is essential and what ain't, this book would be okay.

This text is well written. It is less well-known than it deserves to be, as it now has many competitors. Needless to say, it deserves attention by the serious student and professors alike.This marvelous resource should not be collecting dust on anyone's bookshelf.