General Relativity |  | Author: Robert M. Wald
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
List Price: $48.00
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Rating:  19 reviews
Sales Rank: 220689
Media: Paperback
Edition: First Edition
Pages: 506
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.7
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.9 x 1.5
ISBN: 0226870332
Dewey Decimal Number: 530.11
EAN: 9780226870335
ASIN: 0226870332
Publication Date: June 15, 1984
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Product Description
"Wald's book is clearly the first textbook on general relativity with a totally modern point of view; and it succeeds very well where others are only partially successful. The book includes full discussions of many problems of current interest which are not treated in any extant book, and all these matters are considered with perception and understanding."--S. Chandrasekhar "A tour de force: lucid, straightforward, mathematically rigorous, exacting in the analysis of the theory in its physical aspect."--L. P. Hughston, Times Higher Education Supplement "Truly excellent. . . . A sophisticated text of manageable size that will probably be read by every student of relativity, astrophysics, and field theory for years to come."--James W. York, Physics Today
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 19
 A beautiful book October 31, 2009
Mark Twain (Waterloo, Ont)
Something that seems to seldom be addressed in recommended textbooks for university courses is the degree to which different books suit different people. I own two other General Relativity books: MTW and Dirac's book. Additionally I have often used Weinberg's book. Wald's book again and again has been the book that I have got the most out of when seeking to understand some particular facet of the subject more.
I suppose that the book may appeal to more geometrically and mathematically minded people (the emphasis on geometry being in stark contrast to Weinberg's book). One may argue that other textbooks are superior for giving an intuition about the most familiar consequences of general relativity but I think this book is amongst the very best in terms of providing a solid mathematical toolkit with which one can use to approach an arbitrary problem. I guess this is one definition of understanding General Relativity!
excellent but beware of small books on large and complex topics June 20, 2009
Mitchell Chan
Wald is excellent, but realize what you're purchasing. Wald is a very compact book for such a large and complex topic. IMHO it is a monograph of MTW's Gravity - that is, it assumes you already know General Relativity and attempts to build upon that.
Allow me to ramble and digress. If you're coming in from the cold (ie. college sophmore level physics and math), be prepared to invest in a few other books. In my case, I bought Wald a couple of years ago. I plowed through Part I. Fundamentals and after honest reflection, realized the book was raising more questions than answers. If you find yourself going to google more than reading, that's a sign it's happenning to you!
Wald may seem like a bargain (<$50) but here's the cash outlay from supplemental books:
1. Hartle, Gravity, ~$50. Provides problem solving mechanics of applying einstein's equation.
2. Carroll, Spacetime and Geometry, ~$50. Provides a few derivations which Hartle leaves out.
3. MTW, Gravitation, ~$125. Provides intuition and visualization to Einstein's equation.
4. Schutz, A First Course, ~$30. This book is optional. I only read this because alot of other people did. It's essentially an attempt to dumb down general relativity at the undergraduate college level.
So why do I rank this text 5 stars. After reading the texts above Wald's purpose became immediately clear - to modernize MTW from a mathematical perspective. Wald succeeds with flying colors. For example, I was especially excited discovering and realizing after re-reading Wald that the proof of theorem 2.2 was a detailed answer to one of my homework problems in my differential topology class!
A classical book on General Relativity February 26, 2009
Dario Capasso (New York)
General Relativity, in this book, is viewed as a pure geometrical theory; thus it contains several aspects related to Differential Geometry focused on the classical Theory of Gravity. The first part of the book is an introduction of some fundamental tools to implement the model for Gravity and ends with the formulation of the Einstein equation. The remaining chapters contain several advanced topics as Black Holes or Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formulation of General Relativity, moreover the book includes also a chapter on Quantum Gravity.
Almost perfect November 9, 2008
Vishal Kasliwal (Richmond, VA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book has the best treatment of GR that I have run across so far. Mathmatically, it is good enough to learn the basic principles of Riemannian geometry from, however, it is by no means a 'dense' math text. A text like J M Lee's Introduction to Smooth Manifolds is a good companion to understanding the finer points of the math involved. What it amounts to is that Wald teaches Riemannian geometry like college physics texts teach calculus. Good enough to do things with, but no substitute for a Calculus course. This is not a criticism of the text - it is not Wald's purpose to teach us the finer points of Riemannian geometry here. What Wald does, he does extremely well.
I would earnestly recommend this book to anyone wanting to learn GR provided that they pick up a good Riemannian geometry text like Lee's Intro to Smooth Manifolds. Carroll's GR book is also to be recommended as side reading. Carroll's book is not as rigorous as Wald's (in fact, Carroll's book often defers to Wald's - eg. when showing where Christoffel symbols come from). The way I see it, Carroll and Wald form a Griffiths and Jackson pair of undergrad and graduate texts for GR.
Excellent text for classical general relativity February 27, 2007
Ram Sriharsha (Maryland)
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
Wald's book was the standard text for two graduate courses in GR that I took during my PhD (one was an introductory grad course on GR and the other was an advance special topics course on black holes). The first six chapters lay the groundwork for classical GR, starting with a quick recap of the tensor notation (Wald's Index free notation is very useful), a little bit of differential geometry and the Einstien's equations. The Initial value problem of GR is treated in an elegant chapter that concludes the introduction. Advanced topics like black holes, area theorems, singularity theorems etc are treated in latter chapters, along with a nice chapter on QFT in curved space-time and the Hawking effect. I found Wald's book most useful for understanding the singularity theorems, which have been discussed very lucidly without sacrificing much rigor (some of the more technical details are best left to Hawking and Ellis).
There is a priceless discussion on Penrose diagrams, asymptotic infinity, ADM energy and the BMS group which to my knowledge have never appeared in another book (one has to go back to papers of Ashtekar and Penrose to find this information).
I had no prior exposure to differential geometry when I started reading the book (indeed my background at this point was an undergrad degree in Electronics, so my knowledge of physics when I took this course was rudimentary to say the least). I however found no difficulty in following this book, and indeed this book was the most exciting grad level book that I read until Polchinski's two tomes on String Theory. I would recommend Wald's book for anyone who likes to understand General Relativity and especially Black Hole Thermodynamics...and last but not least, the exercises in the book are all interesting and in some cases are pretty nontrivial. I learnt a lot of GR working out these exercises and highly recommend them to anybody studying this book...it is definitely worth spending time on these exercises.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 19
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