Customer Reviews

Introduction to General Relativity (Pure & Applied Physics)

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This second edition of the Adler, Bazin and Schiffer book is nothing short of miraculous. I have read it off and on for 25 years, and I always manage to learn something new from it. Although it cannot compete with the more recent texts on post-Newtonian mechanics, everything is here for the advanced undergraduate/beginning graduate student: tensor calculus; Riemannian and non-Riemannian geometries; tensor applications in electrodynamics; variational methods; Schwarzschild and Kerr spacetimes; Killing vectors; and much, much more. An entire chapter is devoted to Weyl's gauge-invariant theory and Wheeler's "already unified" field theory. If you have been completely turned off by Misner-Wheeler-Thorne's Gravitation book (along with its somewhat pretentious and totally confusing annotations and sidebar material), and yet you still want to learn a decent amount of general relativity, buy this book while copies are still available. I'm still hoping that a third edition (with a chapter on computer applications) will eventually hit the shelves.

What is unique in this book is that it has the Gödel cosmological solution to
the general relativity equations. It has a good coverage of Weyl's gauge
equations as well and a discussion of the
topological implications of black holes.
The mathematics is well done and relatively easy to follow.
This text is a classic text on gravity theory.