
Lecture Notes on General Relativity (1997) - miobrien
https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9712019
======
musgravepeter
I found Carroll's book excellent (the notes seems very similar).

As the author of a tool for GR calculations (grtensor on github) I've been
collecting intro GR books. I did my PhD in GR 20 years ago and am getting back
into it. My impressions so far:

Carroll is excellent.

Hartle is also great - very physics first approach.

Stephani - Good intro with some material not found in others

Shutz (the book I used in grad school) - solid intro

MTW looks great on the book shelf, very useful every time I dip into it, a bit
daunting to go front to back

Zee - looks interesting, I'm only on p10

Wald - I seldom pull this off the shelf.

As a second book, I highly recommend Poisson "A relativists toolkit".

Another great resource is "Exact space-times in Einstein's General Relativity"
(Griffiths and Podolsky)

~~~
imrehg
Cheers for the recommendations! And it's cool context too, regarding why you
are into GR. As a physicist myself, in the atomic physics area, but not
working within there at the moment, I was wondering: what brought you back,
whether you are doing with in on the side, or something even more substantial?

~~~
musgravepeter
Entirely on the side. I ended up in telecom SW but always tried to putter away
on physics-based side projects (e.g. Geodesic Asteroids and Three Body apps on
iOS, Android).

In playing with geodesic equations I tried to use GRTensorII on my Mac and
decided it was time to update it (my former supervisor & external examiner
were very keen!). This lead me to work through "Relativists Toolkit" \- doing
all the problems - using GRTensor where I could. I'm now planning to spend a
vacation week at the Atlantic GR conference and give a talk on GRIII. My
hobbies tend to get a bit out of control!

Some of this is blogged about on
[http://nbodyphysics.com/blog/](http://nbodyphysics.com/blog/)

~~~
lrc
I'm starting to evolve my work with SICM to cover "Functional Differential
Geometry" [0], mostly because I hope to learn about relativity (special &
general) while doing so. Your book evaluations will certainly help and I will
have to compare notes with GRtensor (when/if I come to understand enough of
the basics, not guaranteed :)

[0] [https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/functional-differential-
geome...](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/functional-differential-geometry)

~~~
musgravepeter
That book looks very interesting. Thanks for the tip.

------
ziotom78
I used these notes when I prepared the general relativity exam in my
university years. I found them much clearer than Wald's "General Relativity",
the textbook used in the class.

However, when I had to prepare lecture notes for my own class on cosmology
several years later, I found these notes a bit too simplistic. Many of the
details and definitions in Wald's text that I found unnecessarily complicated
15 years ago suddenly become unavoidable to my eyes (scompare e.g., Wald's
chapter about manifolds with Carrol's definition).

I still think that Carrol's notes are a great introduction to GR. But it would
be better for you to keep some other bigger text at hand as well, in order to
fill all the details that are missing in the former.

~~~
joshvm
Hobson [, Efstathiou and Lasenby] was the book I used to revise for my exams,
and that was good. It's not overly simplistic and requires a bit of working to
get through the maths, but it's comprehensive and goes further than most
undergraduate courses do (up to Kerr black holes and a bit more).

------
ivan_ah
These are pretty good notes. Here is the PDF version:
[https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9712019](https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9712019)

------
mturmon
Sean Carroll is interviewing Janna Levin at the LA Public Library downtown
branch, next Thursday night: [http://lfla.org/event/black-hole-blues-songs-
outer-space/](http://lfla.org/event/black-hole-blues-songs-outer-space/)

------
bindidwodtj
One directory listing back gives a wealth of further information
[https://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/March01/Carroll3/](https://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/March01/Carroll3/)

------
leephillips
Perhaps similar to the notes at the author's website:

[http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/grnotes/](http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/grnotes/)

?

------
SubiculumCode
Steve Carell's lecture notes on General Relativity? That guy makes me laugh!

~~~
SubiculumCode
you do realize it was a joke? the guy from the office?

