What are some good books for learning general relativity?
Answer
I can only recommend textbooks because that's what I've used, but here are some suggestions:
- Gravity: An Introduction To General Relativity by James Hartle is reasonably good as an introduction, although in order to make the content accessible, he does skip over a lot of mathematical detail. For your purposes, you might consider reading the first few chapters just to get the "big picture" if you find other books to be a bit too much at first.
- A First Course in General Relativity by Bernard Schutz is one that I've heard similar things about, but I haven't read it myself.
- Spacetime and Geometry: An Introduction to General Relativity by Sean Carroll is one that I've used a bit, and which goes into a slightly higher level of mathematical detail than Hartle. It introduces the basics of differential geometry and uses them to discuss the formulation of tensors, connections, and the metric (and then of course it goes on into the theory itself and applications). It's based on these notes which are available for free.
- General Relativity by Robert M. Wald is a classic, though I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I haven't read much of it. From what I know, though, there's certainly no shortage of mathematical detail, and it derives/explains certain principles in different ways from other books, so it can either be a good reference on its own (if you're up for the detail) or a good companion to whatever else you're reading. However it was published back in 1984 and thus doesn't cover a lot of recent developments, e.g. the accelerating expansion of the universe, cosmic censorship, various results in semiclassical gravity and numerical relativity, and so on.
- Gravitation by Charles Misner, Kip Thorne, and John Wheeler, is pretty much the authoritative reference on general relativity (to the extent that one exists). It discusses many aspects and applications of the theory in far more mathematical and logical detail than any other book I've seen. (Consequently, it's very thick.) I would recommend having a copy of this around as a reference to go to about specific topics, when you have questions about the explanations in other books, but it's not the kind of thing you'd sit down and read large chunks of at once. It's also worth noting that this dates back to 1973, so it's out of date in the same ways as Wald's book (and more).
- Gravitation and Cosmology: Principles and Applications of the General Theory of Relativity by Steven Weinberg is another one that I've read a bit of. Honestly I find it a bit hard to follow - just like some of Weinberg's other books, actually - since he gets into such detailed explanations, and it's easy to get bogged down in trying to understand the details and forget about the main point of the argument. Still, this might be another one to go to if you're wondering about the details omitted by other books. This is not as comprehensive as the Misner/Thorne/Wheeler book, though.
- A Relativist's Toolkit: The Mathematics of Black-Hole Mechanics by Eric Poisson is a bit beyond the purely introductory level, but it does provide practical guidance on doing certain calculations which is missing from a lot of other books.
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