Reddit Reddit reviews Relativity, Gravitation and Cosmology: A Basic Introduction (Oxford Master Series in Physics)

We found 2 Reddit comments about Relativity, Gravitation and Cosmology: A Basic Introduction (Oxford Master Series in Physics). Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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Relativity, Gravitation and Cosmology: A Basic Introduction (Oxford Master Series in Physics)
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2 Reddit comments about Relativity, Gravitation and Cosmology: A Basic Introduction (Oxford Master Series in Physics):

u/kameboy · 4 pointsr/AskPhysics

Unfortunately getting to the level where general relativity can make sense takes about 3 years of undergraduate physics. If you allow some watering down, and are not out to get "working knowledge", I believe the discussion in introductory textbooks on GR can be fairly accessible if you are willing to accept the theory and skip technical details... if that makes any sense. For instance, look in Sean Carroll's Lecture Notes on General Relativity, page 199, about black hole evaporation.
There are many other books though. I liked the discussion in Ta-Pei Cheng's Relativity, Gravitation and Cosmology, but it too may be overly technical.

u/Cronecker · 2 pointsr/physicsbooks

Have you had a look at Carroll's general relativity notes? Chapters 2 and 3 are predominantly about developing the mathematics behind GR, and are very good introductions to this. I have a copy of Carroll's book and I can promise you that those chapters are almost unchanged in the book as compared to the lecture notes. This is my main suggestion really, as the notes are freely available, written by an absolute expert and a joy to read. I can't recommend them (and the book really) enough.

Most undergraduate books on general relativity start with a "physics first" type approach, where the underlying material about manifolds and curvature is developed as it is needed. The only problem with this is that it makes seeing the underlying picture for how the material works more difficult. I wouldn't neccessarily say avoid these sort of books (my favourite two of this kind would be Cheng's book and Hartle's.) but be aware that they are probably not what you are looking for if you want a consistent description of the mathematics.

I would also say avoid the harder end of the scale (Wald) till you've at least done your course. Wald is a tough book, and certainly not aimed at people seeing the material for the first time.

Another useful idea would be looking for lecture notes from other universities. As an example, there are some useful notes here from cambridge university. Generally I find doing searches like "general relativity site:.ac.uk filetype:pdf" in google is a good way to get started searching for decent lecture notes from other universities.

If you're willing to dive in a bit more to the mathematics, the riemannian geometry book by DoCarmo is supposed to be excellent, although I've only seen his differential geometry book (which was very good). As a word of warning, this book might assume knowledge of differential geometry from his earlier book. The book you linked by Bishop also looks fine, and there is also the book by Schutz which is supposed to be great and this book by Sternberg which looks pretty good, although quite tough.

Finally, if you would like I have a dropbox folder of collected together material for GR which I could share with you. It's not much, but I've got some decent stuff collected together which could be very helpful. As a qualifier, I had to teach myself GR for my undergrad project, so I know how it feels being on your own with it. Good luck!