Reviews for A Short Course in General Relativity

The average rating for A Short Course in General Relativity based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-02-23 00:00:00 Andrew Hamasaki My year of science reading got off to a slow start thanks to two articles (or is it three) that I had to write first. I can feel that real estate opening up in my brain and what better to fill it with than science! So for this year long review, I am starting with the subject that originally fascinated me in high school: relativity. This text is an excellent place to begin for those who eventually want to try and crack the Wheeler, Thorne, Meisner volume on gravitation. It is for first yr grad students and is very visual and clear. This is not the book for philosophical questions about spacetime, just a head start on the needed vocabulary to ask those questions. I followed things up through parallel transport, geodesic deviation and curvature. I finally was bothered about never really understanding what a metric tensor is, so I stopped and changed books. Now I've finished and this is a sweet little volume indeed, taking you up to the Schwarzschild solution and gravitational radiation. I would recommend doing McMahon's demystified and Schutz's First Course in GR before this.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-09-12 00:00:00 Lisa Kalomiris The appendices are very useful for understanding tensors and dual vector spaces. A good introduction into the mathematics and physics of GR!