Time and Place Mayer Hall 5301 Monday and Wednesday, 12:30- 1:50 Grading There will be a homework assigned every 2-3 weeks (approximately) There will be a final project or take home exam Grade will be a combination of 60% homework, 30% final project/exam, 10% participation Office Hours Monday & Wednesday: 4pm With: Prof. Grinstein Mayer Hall 5230 Office hours will continue until the earlier of 4pm or all students leaving Additional office hours will be arranged upon request Course Description From the UCSD course catalogue: This is a two-quarter course on gravitation and the general theory of relativity.

1. General Theory Of Relativity Pdf

The first quarter is intended to be offered every year and may be taken independently of the second quarter. The second quarter will be offered in alternate years.

Topics covered in the first quarter include special relativity, differential geometry, the equivalence principle, the Einstein field equations, and experimental and observational tests of gravitation theories. The second quarter will focus on more advanced topics, including gravitational collapse, Schwarzschild and Kerr geometries, black holes, gravitational radiation, cosmology, and quantum gravitation.

This is a classic text, but 'classic' isn't completely a good thing. General relativity is a living field, and 29 years is a long time. The book never had an acceptable amount of contact with observation, and that shortcoming has become even more severe with the passage of time; it predates LIGO, Gravity Probe B, modern studies of CMB anisotropy, and the discoveries of supermassive black holes and the nonzero cosmological constant. Pedagogically, I would not recommend this book for someone encountering GR for the first time. For a first-time student, a more appropriate text would be Carroll or the also-classic Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler.

For someone who is serious about GR, the book is useful because it treats some advanced topics in a more accessible fashion than one can find elsewhere. For a first-time student, a more appropriate text would be Carroll or the also-classic Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler. For someone who is serious about GR, the book is useful because it treats some advanced topics in a more accessible fashion than one can find elsewhere.For a very first look at GR without already having a background in differential geometry, I think a quick read the first few chapters of Schutz is a good idea. After that, I second the recommendation for Carroll (and I think it would be wise to read before MTW). Of course, Carroll (and most others) don't assume prior knowledge of differential geometry either, but Schutz takes you through it at such a leisurely pace that it's especially good for first exposure. I usually suggest the Schutz Carroll sequence for introductions, followed by either Wald or MTW for further study. I wouldn't recommend Schutz over Carroll at all.

Schutz butchers the beautiful subject of differential geometry and if you've seen in the past on people asking specific questions from the text on this forum, it is usually tied to his horrible exposition of differential geometry. As a golden rule of thumb: never learn a math subject from a physics textbook especially when the subject forms the very core of the underlying physical theory. Wald is top notch - nothing bad to say about it at all and Carroll is also good (less advanced but still covers a lot and his tone is very gentle).

General Theory Of Relativity Pdf

Wald is very mathematical which, for me anyways, makes it much more enjoyable. Carroll sometimes handwaves the mathematics but he still explains everything at a nice level of rigor.

I think Wald is fine as a first book on GR, but I would only recommend it (as a first book) to a very serious student who's studying differential geometry at the same time. I recommend the books by John M. Lee for that, 'Introduction to smooth manifolds' and 'Riemannian manifolds: an introduction to curvature'. These books are excellent.

The only problem is that you need both of them. I also second the recommendation to read the first few chapters of Schutz first. Wald only devotes one page to SR, but Schutz covers it very thoroughly. Schutz also contains a nice introduction to tensors. (Edit: Just to make it perfectly clear, the following two sentences are about Schutz, not Wald).

It's a GR book, but what makes it good are the parts about SR and tensors. The part about GR is too thin on differential geometry for my taste. To those of you who've read/worked with all of the big name GR texts (Wald, MTW, Weinberg, Landau's fields), if you were to buy only one of them which one would you pick? I'm looking for an encyclopedic thing that will keep me coming back but I would like it to have some treatment on gravitational waves.

I've taken a 'mathematical methods for GR' course so I wouldn't be spending much time on the first few chapters(but it would be nice if it were self-contained like Landau's classical theory of fields). I've read some of Carroll's but I really didn't like it(too many handwavy explanations, it just doesn't flow well), and a bit of Weinberg's 'Gravitation and Cosmology' and I really liked it(notation was identical to my course), but I only read the intro chapters on tensor calculus and not the actual physics.

That's kind of what I was trying to avoid, as my course pretty much consisted of exercises like this (mostly simpler things, ie tensor transformation of Christoffel symbols,general tensor identity proofs, grinding out Ricci components and curves from a given metric but no actual derivation of the Schwarschild or FLRW metrics.)If you look at chapter 11 of Wald, problem 11.6 is a funny one because the first two parts of the problem are insanely trivial whereas the third part asks you to calculate the Komar integral for the total angular momentum of the charged kerr space-time. It was such a painful calculation that I cried, several times. EDIT: Just to clarify, Wald does derive the main results (e.g. Schwarzschild metric) and uses very satisfying geometric arguments in doing so. Also, just for fun, here is a worked out example of another typical tensor calculus problem from Wald (problem 7.1, so yeah same chapter as the one I mentioned above lol). Wald has almost no applications and makes almost no connection with experiment, which makes it a poor choice for a student's first introduction to GR. I would start with Taylor and Wheeler's Spacetime Physics, which, although it's an SR text, actually has quite a bit of material in it that explicitly prepares you for GR.

Pervect's suggestion of reading an undergrad GR text is also excellent. Hartle is good. Exploring Black Holes is a fine book as far as it goes, but its focus is very narrow, and it won't prepare you with any of the mathematical techniques. Rather than Wald, which is extremely out of date, I would suggest Carroll.

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There is even a free preliminary version of Carroll online.