Customer Reviews

Relativity: Special, General, and Cosmological

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I think both undergraduates and graduates students in physics will find this text enjoyable and enlightening. The sections on general relativity and cosmology are, I think, a little less thorough and complicated than those in Wald or Shultz, though I've only briefly perused those other texts. (GR is still plenty abstract and mathematical in Rindler.) The end of chapter exercises are well-chosen and lead the reader to understand the material. Rindler does an excellent job of keep physical insight at the forefront of his discussions. He points out and resolves a number of interesting paradoxes, and he mentions a number of interesting modern experiments when relevant.

Professor Rindler explains the concepts with clarity and rigour while minimising the complexities of the notation and formulae. His ability to put ideas into words is outstanding. If you have heard the tales of trains that whoosh past in the ether, and are still none the wiser; or have wondered how the background radiation that set out on its way at the speed of light when the world was a smaller simpler place is only now reaching us, this book will enlighten you. Even for those whose maths cannot keep up it should be worthwhile, stimulating even, to read the sections at the beginning of each chapter, and those elsewhere light in formulae. For those willing to tackle the exercises he is perhaps a little too generous with the hints.

This is one of the worst text I came across. Author keep discussing a topic but never points to the result. A book where you keep flipping back and forth to make sense. Often notations are used but there is no explanation what they represents. I have gone through chapter 15 and 18 ,on Linearized GR and FRW metric, following every step and found out that there are few errors and a lot of key steps are omitted. For example, gauge transformations are done and results are obtained but if you won't consult other similar texts then you won't know what are the results and which are the transformations, unless you already are a professor. Almost same topic is discussed in Inverno's book and you can clearly see what are the various transformations and what are the results.

A book may contain every topic what you are looking for but the key Qs is how well are they conveyed. In order to write an excellent text the author should be first clear about it in his own mind and organize it before publishing it. Save yourself and get a nicer book like Inverno or Stephani. I would not recommend this text for GR unless absolutely necessary.