Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #172799 in Books
• Published on: 1984-06-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 506 pages

Customer Reviews

Advanced, NOT the TELEPHONE BOOK
Wald's title is great and one of the best for a graduate course. It treats clearly with the mathematics, the Einstein equation and their conclusions, demonstrating every assert or theorem. However it isn't a book for beginners or for a complete reference of the subject. It centers its attention with black hole thermodynamics, singularity theorems, causality and things like spinors. The fundaments, and above all, the underlying ideas of General Relativity are treated very quickly, but it is ideal for people who know general relativity and want to increase his skills in order to become a "relativistic expert".

I think that this should be the relativity references (in order):

* Beginner: Spacetime Physics (Wheeler, Taylor), A journey into spacetime and gravitation (Wheeler), Exploring Black Holes (Wheeler, Taylor), A short course in General Relativity (Schutz; you only need multivariable calculus).

* "Middle": Spacetime Physics, A short course in General Relativity, Geometrical Methods of Mathematical Physics (Schutz), Gravitation (Misner, Thorne, Wheeler) = the telephone book.

* Advanced: A short course in General Relativity, Geometrical Methods of Mathematical Physics, Gravitation, (only part of) Geometry Topology and Physics (Nakahara), General Relativity (Wald), The Large structure of SpaceTime (Hawking).

Of course, these are only my orientative guidelines. Gravitation and Cosmology by Weinberg is a great book, but I don't like it because of his not geometric approach, all of above treat the modern point of view of Differential Geometry, clear, beauty and intuitive, despite not being the approach used by Einstein.

Not a book for beginners
If you are taking you first course in general relativity this book is not for you. Wald was the recommended text for my undergraduate course on general relativity. It is too complicated and too rigorous for first timers. General relativity is not an easy topic at the best of times. If you are a beginner make it easier for yourself and buy a book aimed at beginners. Having said all that, Wald is not a bad book just a difficult one. Many, many concepts within the subject area are covered very well. My lecturer thought highly of this book. So, if you already have a grounding in General Relativity, and in particular some knowledge of set theory, then this book would certainly give you a deeper understanding of the theory.

Good mathematical introduction
Wald is a rare textbook that does not flinch away from mathematical technicalities. It is to be recommended to those theorists with a solid grounding in pure maths.
However, it is not quite the perfect mathmos' GR book. The section on Differential Geometry seems rather clumsily presented for one who has had a course in Differential Manifolds and Cohomology.
Of course such knowledge may be useless for practical purposes in Relativity. Therefore overall, Wald is a good book for those mathematically minded and wanting a career as Relativity theorists.