Mastering General Relativity: Student Experiences

[kent davidge]

In my Google searchs and by reading threads on this forum I've seen that the books people most recommend on general relativity are
Graviation, by Thorne, Wheeler and Misner,
Wald's book and
Weinberg's book.

I'm in the first year to get a bachelor degree on physics and I could read any of these books at the university library. I've read a little bit of MTW, but I don't like the way it states the subjects (like, metric is a machine with two slots to which you put two vectors), I prefer something more formal, like metric is a mapping from V x V to R.

I'd like to know some experiences from someone on this forum when at student years. What books did you read at that time? How did you get your knowledge on this fascinating subject?

hey, I don't know if the thread tittle is appropriate, in any case please excuse my poor english.

 

[haushofer]

I used Sean Carroll's online notes when I was in my 3d year. Still recommended. Zee's book is also great; I consider it to be the successor of mtw. But, like mtw, it's phonebook-thick.

 

[robphy]

As a first and second-year undergrad, I tried to read Spacetime Physics, Gravitation/MTW, and Schutz's book on my own... MTW was slow going... but I'd come back to it every now and then.
My modern physics professor suggested Geroch's GR from A to B... interesting viewpoint, but seemed too verbose and elementary at the time.
Later in undergrad, I took various courses that used Ray Skinner's book, Landau's book, and [as an independent study] Lawden.
Only later would I appreciate Geroch's viewpoints when I sat in on his class [after taking Wald's course in grad school]. This was my "a-ha" moment.
You may find some interesting material here: http://home.uchicago.edu/~geroch/