Gravitation:Foundations and Frontiers by T. Padmanabhan

[ShayanJ]

I've seen several textbooks on GR, but this one seems very interesting and exciting to me and is my choice to read when I have the time. Let's see how you people think about it!

https://books.google.com/books?id=B...d=0CB8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=padmanabhan&f=false

 

[jedishrfu]

Looks pretty interesting. How well do they describe differential forms? Do they show pictures as was done in the Wheeler book on Gravitation?

 

[ShayanJ]

Looks pretty interesting. How well do they describe differential forms? Do they show pictures as was done in the Wheeler book on Gravitation?

Not even a single picture in that chapter! But from a few pages that I have read from the beginning of the book and also from the materials it covers, I can say its targeting an audience who are not beginners in physics. I mean, you can't call it a book for "beginning grad\advanced undergrad". So its not going to be that much pedagogical and it seems to me if you think about the right audience, then it becomes a good book in terms of pedagogy too. But I should say I felt this book is mine when I saw it the first time, so I really like it.
I should say that the author explains that some of the exercises and projects in the book are even proper for being chosen for a thesis topic and some are even still open to research!

 

[jedishrfu]

That's great. If I get the chance I'll have to check it out. GR was always a fascinating topic for me. I studied from Wheelers book when it was available as preprints at school and always had fond feelings for that time even though I was totally lost in the math.

More recently I got Zees book for similar reasons but it's a lot harder and I am a lot older but it's still fun to look at and imagine that some day understanding will come.

 

[bolbteppa]

It's a modern update of Landau & Lifshitz, usually doing the same thing Landau does but then giving two alternative ways of doing the same thing, or nicely justifying something Landau slightly glossed over (e.g. that ds'^2 = ds^2 in special relativity). It also includes more information. There are videos following the book here

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGqalPsP5GRDb9LUhPKisP245W4yTMBYF

His intuition is sheerly amazing, the videos are worth it for his diversions alone.

I would recommend this book with Landau & Dalarsson's book as a trio, where Dalarsson is the kind of book that will actually work out the Christoffel symbols explicitly and go really slow still following Landau's presentation, but Landau's book is still the best, I mean his presentation of GR mimics his presentation of SR & EM, you'll have done the gist of it twice already by the time you read the GR sections.