Advice on GR book specific to my needs

[robousy]

Hi,

I am interested in what I can DO with the stress energy tensor once I've obtained it from a metric.

I am not so interested in the formal development, just a book or paper that shows what its good for.

I am interested in cosmology, specifically: brane worlds, brane gas cosmology, stability of compact extra dimensions and the casimir effect.

If anyone can recommend a good pedagogical source not too dense in formalism then I'd like very much to hear from you!

 

[robphy]

Essentially what you have obtained is the "distribution of the matter content" [in terms of "matter fields"] obtained from the geometry. Probably the first thing you should do is to check that the stress energy is physically reasonable. Check whether it satisfies the "energy conditions" (See, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_conditions ).

 

[Stingray]

By appropriately contracting the stress-energy tensor with the 4-velocity (field) of some observer, you'll find the local energy and momentum densities of the matter that are seen by that person. You'll also get the stress tensor he observes (as it is usually defined in Newtonian treatments of elasticity and fluid mechanics). Any GR text should explain this.