Understanding General Relativity: What Does it Take?

[murad60]

Hi, everybody

I'm just wondering what it takes to understand general relativity? And can one understand the underlying math-bench and is it possible to construct intuitive meanings to the concepts of general relativity in a way that is fruitful to its understanding? anyone knows such self-contained intuition-aware reference ?

 

[Fredrik]

To really understand it, you need to know differential geometry pretty well. You'd have to study something like, "Introduction to smooth manifolds" and "Riemannian manifolds: an introduction to curvature", both by John M. Lee.

The best non-mathematical book on GR is "Black holes and time warps: Einstein's outrageous legacy", by Kip Thorne.