Product Description

Spacetime and Geometry: An Introduction to General Relativity provides a lucid and thoroughly modern introduction to general relativity. With an accessible and lively writing style, it introduces modern techniques to what can often be a formal and intimidating subject. Readers are led from the physics of flat spacetime (special relativity), through the intricacies of differential geometry and Einstein's equations, and on to exciting applications such as black holes, gravitational radiation, and cosmology.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #250483 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 513 pages

About the Author

Sean Carroll is an assistant professor in the Physics Department, Enrico Fermi Institute, and Center for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago. His research ranges over a number of topics in theoretical physics, focusing on cosmology, field theory, and gravitation. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1993, and spent time as a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Theoretical Physics at MIT and the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has been awarded fellowships from the Sloan and Packard foundations, as well as the MIT Graduate Student Council Teaching Award. For more information, see his Web site at http://pancake.uchicago.edu/~carroll

Customer Reviews

Almost the very best introduction...
You can get the official lectures which inspired most of this book in: http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/gr-qc/9712019

Yes. This book is really a very clear and thorough introduction to modern General Relativity thanks to the very up to date chapters, although the author does not deepen enough in most of the long steps and computations or examples as a real beginner would like but anyway not many books do so. Special Relativity is reviewed but obviously assumed and differential geometry is introduced and developed quite enough but again some familiarity manipulating tensors is assumed (for this the best is to try Schutz's "Geometrical methods"). The layout is really nice and the book is more or less self-contained in every aspect with a "introduction-to-less-than-advanced-level" approach in most aspects.

There are no solutions for any exercise (a thumb up for Schutz's book on the same subject) but the worst flaw could be the number of typos for being the first edition, not too many or too important though (and reported in his web).

Overall you should buy this book if you know special relativity, undergraduate electrodynamics and notions of tensors because reading and understanding it through is more than enough for having a semi-advanced level in general relativity allowing you to tackle more tough stuff like Wald or Hawking's books. It's one of the latest best books on the subject.