General relativity resources
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Contents
Books
Popular
- Leisurely pace, provides superb intuition for Schwarzschild geometry.
- Covers much more ground, while remaining concise and readable.
- A delightful romp through the physics of black holes. Features many personal anecdotes from the author's distinguished career.
Textbooks
Beginning undergraduate level
- This book is an expanded version of an earlier book by the same author, Essential Relativity, but covers more topics in greater detail.
Advanced undergraduate level
- Full tensor formulation of GR is postponed till the last of the three parts of the book. Particularly suitable for an introductory GR course with an emphasis on cosmology.
- One feature of this textbook not found in its competitors is a nice discussion of accretion discs.
- In contrast to other introductions, these authors use an exceptionally clear comparison of linearized general relativity with electromagnetism to motivate Einstein's field equations. Superb treatment of observational tests and of gravitational lensing. Should be useful for students wishing to master the textbook by Weinberg.
- Readable, well illustrated, fairly comprehensive without becoming encyclopedic.
- Clearly written, short and sweet; covers less ground than the others but much cheaper.
- Features an outstanding treatment of tensor calculus and the stress-energy tensor, a key topic which beginners often have trouble grasping. The treatment of linearized gravitational waves and stellar models is also outstanding.
Graduate level
- Readable, up-to-date. Features an outstanding treatment of the mass, charge, and spin of isolated objects, plus an elementary introduction to quantum field theory on curved spacetimes and Hawking radiation. Further essential material is concisely explained in valuable appendices. [Book website].
- Clear and very well organized. Features excellent treatment of far-field and weak-field expansions and linearized gravitational waves, including multipole moments. Offers more on solution techniques than other introductory textbooks.
- Often cited as the definitive graduate level textbook. Features an outstanding introduction to tensors (with a clear distinction between abstract indices and particular indices, overlooked by most other authors), as well as the basic singularity, stability, and uniqueness theorems, quantum field theory on curved spacetimes, and black hole thermodynamics. Much valuable material is clearly explained in a series of superb appendices. In general, this book focuses more on developing insight into mathematical formalism and techniques than on developing physical insight.
- A unique textbook straddling the modern and pre-modern eras in general relativity, this offers a dual introduction to Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism and Einstein's theory of gravitation. Noteworthy topics include a good treatment of multipole moments and background material needed for the BKL conjecture.
- A classic general relativity textbook. Features a unique two-track organization, with numerous boxes, tables, figures, and citations. In general, this book focuses more on developing physical and geometrical intuition than the textbook by Wald. Generally regarded as the first modern textbook on general relativity.
- Demanding but full of valuable physical insight and techniques. No pictures, in marked contrast to the textbook by Misner, Thorne & Wheeler. Excellent treatment of topics related to PPN formalism, weak field approximations, gravitons, as well as applications of particle physics to cosmology. No exercises.
Special topics
- Don't be fooled by the subtitle; this book explains many key concepts and techniques which are needed by all contemporary graduate students, but are not adequately explained elsewhere. Essential topics covered here include congruences (expansion, vorticity, and shear), optical scalars, junction conditions for matching interior solutions to exterior solutions, thin shells (including null shells), spatial hyperslices, and energy conditions.
- This awesome monograph attempts to provide an up-to-date survey of many of the tens of thousands of known exact solutions, plus solution techniques and essential background such as Newman-Penrose formalism.
- Not easy to read, but one of the few textbooks to offer an introduction to the important Newman/Penrose formalism. Also features much material on gravitational waves.
- This book is billed as an introductory textbook, but has no exercises and may be hard to read. Unique features include a chapter on measurement theory for general relativity, plus an introduction to tetrad formalism.
- A collection of excellent problems, with sketch solutions in the back. Test your skills!
- A classic and highly influentical monograph; features excellent motivation of the field equation and careful discussion of some important exact solutions, especially their causal or conformal structure.
External links
Online tutorials
- Baez, John & Bunn, Ted; This superb expository paper explains the meaning of the field equation in terms of the motion of a cloud of free falling test particles.
- Baez, John;
- Carroll, Sean M.; A concise but very readable overview.
Webcourses
- An elementary introduction to relativistic physics, including a smattering of gtr.
- An introduction to general relativity at the level of Misner, Thorne & Wheeler.
- A topics course on gravitational wave detectors, featuring the draft of the instructor's forthcoming textbook.
- An idiosyncratic website, providing extensive discussion of various aspects of special and general relativity.
- Extensive (227 pages) lecture notes for an introductory course on general relativity. Readable, largely self-contained material.
- Another set of readable, largely self-contained lecture notes.
- - The theory of general relativity in an easily understandable way.
Reading lists
- A much more extensive reading list, on which this page is loosely based.
- By John Baez and Emory F. Bunn.
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