Lecture Notes on General Relativity (1997) | Hacker News Reader

Lecture Notes on General Relativity (1997)

arxiv.org

105 pointsmiobrien17 comments

I found Carroll's book excellent (the notes seems very similar).

As the author of a tool for GR calculations (grtensor on github) I've been collecting intro GR books. I did my PhD in GR 20 years ago and am getting back into it. My impressions so far:

Carroll is excellent.

Hartle is also great - very physics first approach.

Stephani - Good intro with some material not found in others

Shutz (the book I used in grad school) - solid intro

MTW looks great on the book shelf, very useful every time I dip into it, a bit daunting to go front to back

Zee - looks interesting, I'm only on p10

Wald - I seldom pull this off the shelf.

As a second book, I highly recommend Poisson "A relativists toolkit".

Another great resource is "Exact space-times in Einstein's General Relativity" (Griffiths and Podolsky)

There is also a nice small book by Paul Dirac https://books.google.ru/books?id=Jtu-n8AzJhMC

Unlike other texts, it derives everything through embedding of the space-time manifold to a high-dimensional Euclidian space. It means that although it lacks some generality, the curvature and covariant differentiation become somewhat more intuitive and the calculations might feel easier to follow for those who are studying the subject for the first time and are not familiar with differential geometry.

Cheers for the recommendations! And it's cool context too, regarding why you are into GR. As a physicist myself, in the atomic physics area, but not working within there at the moment, I was wondering: what brought you back, whether you are doing with in on the side, or something even more substantial?

Entirely on the side. I ended up in telecom SW but always tried to putter away on physics-based side projects (e.g. Geodesic Asteroids and Three Body apps on iOS, Android).

In playing with geodesic equations I tried to use GRTensorII on my Mac and decided it was time to update it (my former supervisor & external examiner were very keen!). This lead me to work through "Relativists Toolkit" - doing all the problems - using GRTensor where I could. I'm now planning to spend a vacation week at the Atlantic GR conference and give a talk on GRIII. My hobbies tend to get a bit out of control!

Some of this is blogged about on http://nbodyphysics.com/blog/

I'm starting to evolve my work with SICM to cover "Functional Differential Geometry" [0], mostly because I hope to learn about relativity (special & general) while doing so. Your book evaluations will certainly help and I will have to compare notes with GRtensor (when/if I come to understand enough of the basics, not guaranteed :)

[0] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/functional-differential-geome...

That book looks very interesting. Thanks for the tip.

Weinberg: Gravitation and Cosmology - The definite reference

Padmanabhan: Gravitation: Foundations and Frontiers - A modern point of view

Feynman: Lectures on Gravitation - Feynmans unique insights are a rare gem

Mukhanov: Introduction to Quantum Effects in Gravity - The best introduction to quantum gravity (and also quantum field theory)

I used these notes when I prepared the general relativity exam in my university years. I found them much clearer than Wald's "General Relativity", the textbook used in the class.

However, when I had to prepare lecture notes for my own class on cosmology several years later, I found these notes a bit too simplistic. Many of the details and definitions in Wald's text that I found unnecessarily complicated 15 years ago suddenly become unavoidable to my eyes (scompare e.g., Wald's chapter about manifolds with Carrol's definition).

I still think that Carrol's notes are a great introduction to GR. But it would be better for you to keep some other bigger text at hand as well, in order to fill all the details that are missing in the former.

Hobson [, Efstathiou and Lasenby] was the book I used to revise for my exams, and that was good. It's not overly simplistic and requires a bit of working to get through the maths, but it's comprehensive and goes further than most undergraduate courses do (up to Kerr black holes and a bit more).

There was a submission (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14177074) here recently that linked to the wikepedia article on the curse of knowledge. Could it be that Wald's textbook illustrates that phenomenon?

> Wald's chapter about manifolds with Carrol's definition

You shouldn't be getting these definitions from physics books anyway.

Carrol's note are good to get a decent grasp on the subject and using them as a trampoline to reach higher levels.

These are pretty good notes. Here is the PDF version: https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9712019

Sean Carroll is interviewing Janna Levin at the LA Public Library downtown branch, next Thursday night: http://lfla.org/event/black-hole-blues-songs-outer-space/

One directory listing back gives a wealth of further information https://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/March01/Carroll3/

Perhaps similar to the notes at the author's website:

http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/grnotes/

Steve Carell's lecture notes on General Relativity? That guy makes me laugh!

you do realize it was a joke? the guy from the office?

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