Book Suggestions: Learn Einstein's General Theory of Relativity

[Akshay690]

Can anyone please help me with a good book to read relativity I am currently trying to read from Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity Øyvind Grøn andSigbjørn Hervik
Please I need to learn from basics to top

 

[haushofer]

Gron and Hervik is not really suitable for a first exposure, is my experience. I used Carroll's notes on Arxiv. Highly recommended.

 

[George Jones]

I like Gron and Hervik, and I like Carroll's notes,

https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9712019

but I don't either is suitable as introductory self-study material (except for very strong students).

Carroll's book, "An Introduction to General Relativity:Spacetime and Geometry" is much better than his notes, but it is not free.

My personal recommendations (and thus probably different than other folks' recommendations) for self-study are:

1) "Gravity: An Introduction to Einstein's Relativity" by Hartle,
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0805386629/?tag=pfamazon01-20

2) "A First Course in General Relativity" by Schutz,
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0521887054/?tag=pfamazon01-20

together with "A Student's Manual for A First Course in General Relativity" by Scott,
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1107638577/?tag=pfamazon01-20

3)"A General Relativity Workbook" by Moore,
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1891389823/?tag=pfamazon01-20

 

[robphy]

Here is a sample from Tom Moore's workbook:
http://pages.pomona.edu/~tmoore/grw/resources.html
And student manual:
http://pages.pomona.edu/~tmoore/grw/onlinestudentman.html

 

[Ibix]

I quite enjoyed our own Ben Crowell's books, available from www.lightandmatter.com. They don't go into as much detail, I think, as other titles mentioned here. But I liked their presentation and it helped set context for Carroll and Schutz.

I also liked Einstein's "The Meaning of Relativity". It's rather elderly and a lot of the maths is presented in a rather old fashioned way. But he was trying to convince a lot of hidebound old physicists that he wasn't crazy, and I found that a useful perspective.

 

[pixel]

Instead of a book, would you consider following a free course that's available online? There's Leonard Susskind's course from Stanford and Alexander Maloney's course from McGill. I preferred the latter.

As for books, some of them are quite formidable for a beginner learning on their own. There are a couple that are more geared toward the novice and will put you in a better position to follow some of the heavyweights on Physics Forums:
o A Most Incomprehensible Thing: Notes Towards a Very Gentle Introduction to the Mathematics of Relativity by Peter Collier
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0957389450/?tag=pfamazon01-20
o The Einstein Theory of Relativity, A Trip to the Fourth Dimension by Lillian Lieber
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1589880447/?tag=pfamazon01-20

The style of Lieber's book is unconventional but I found it to be excellent. Collier's book is a bit odd as it assumes you don't even know calculus and spends a lot of pages going over basics like that.

As usual, some topics are not covered in all the sources, or some may do a particular topic better than the others, so it wouldn't hurt to have more than one available.

 

[vanhees71]

Ehm, why shoud I read a book, which promise me that the subject treated by it is incomprehensible. I read books, because I want to understand something!

 

[pixel]

Ehm, why shoud I read a book, which promise me that the subject treated by it is incomprehensible. I read books, because I want to understand something!

Ha - it is a strange title for a book.

 

[Ibix]

At least according to Google, it's a quote by Einstein: "The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible". Whether or not the attribution is sound, I'd guess it's the source of the name.

 

[yenchin]

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0387260781/?tag=pfamazon01-20 (Foster and Nightingale) is pretty nice as an introduction to the subject, perhaps supplement it with a more standard text like Carroll's.