Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: Gravitation and Cosmology : Principles and Applications of the General Theory of Relativity by Steven Weinberg ISBN: 0-471-92567-5 Publisher: Wiley Text Books Pub. Date: July, 1972 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $113.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.33 (12 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A book based on the physics, not the mathematics
Comment: After a completing graduate school, I decided it was time to learn GR on my own. I got Weinberg's book, and, at first reading, I was put off by it--there are effectively no diagrams, no problems, and no pedagogy. So on to Misner, Thorne, Wheeler. Well these kings have no clothes: MTW contains almost no clean, declarative sentences and could be reduced to 1/4 its size with straightforward editing. So I bought B. F. Schutz's book read it, and and went back to Weinberg's book. With both in hand, I am acquiring a satisfying understanding of GR. And I now realize that Weinberg's book is a masterpiece. As in all his texts, Weinberg's passion is to expose the underlying logic of the physics. All follows from the Equivalnce Princple, and this view gives his book a logic coherency that other's lack. (Try seeing where the Equivalence principle fits in Schutz's presentation.) One criticism: I believe that Weinberg was writing a text for his peers to set them straight about GR; he neglected students. It would have been great if he could have included a mathematical appendix or two to make the text more accessible. But even so, it is a wonderful book.
Rating: 5
Summary: Best GR reference
Comment: Despite that lack of material on black holes, or a modern differential geometry treatment of the theory (which can be found elsewhere, such as in Hawking & Ellis), this remains almost certainly the best introductory text to general relativity and a valuable reference work for anybody. It is a work of great beauty and profundity, with writing much better than the at times bizarre Misner, Thorner & Wheeler and more comprehensible than Wald: carefully weighed sentences and a smooth narrative flow make reading an extraordinarily pleasant experience, for a physics textbook. I've even read it at 2am in the morning. If the technical content (black holes, cauchy problem/ivp, spinors, NP formalism) is slightly (but not much!) less than can be found in Wald, then it is compensated for in the material on symmetric spaces, or the chapter on stellar equilibrium and collapse, which give physical insight beyond GR. And, above all, it is valuable for the dated but still useful material on classical cosmology. One may ignore the odd comments about incidental relations to differential geometry, and, to be honest, if anyone finds the black holes/cauchy problem sections of Wald comprehensive enough to be useful, I would be surprised. Neither Schutz nor Stephani impress me solidly, either. A useful next read might instead be Advanced General Relativity, John Stewart, CUP. In short, it is a beautifully written masterpiece.
Rating: 2
Summary: Has been overrated. Don't buy without comparing...
Comment: This is a seriously old-fashioned and out of date book. It was published around 1972 and EVEN THEN was knocked out of contention by the massively superior Misner, Thorne & Wheeler treatise and by Hawking and Ellis' "Large Scale Structure of S.T." - both published at the same time. Weinberg is by nature a quantum theorist and is here writing outside his home territory and it shows. The laborious tensorial notation is unintuitive, dense and reminiscent of fifties textbooks. The treatment is stale and uninspiring (Eddington's "Mathematical Theory of R." written in 1922 has more sparkle!). Add to this Robert M. Wald's classic 1985 GR book (Univ. Chicago Press) and Weinberg's treatment simply isn't in the running. Do not rush into buying on other recommendations without comparing it with Misner etc., Hawking etc. and Wald.
 |
Title: Gravitation by Charles W. Misner, John Archibald Wheeler, Kip S. Thorne, Kip Thorne, John Wheeler ISBN: 0716703440 Publisher: W H Freeman & Co. Pub. Date: September, 1973 List Price(USD): $118.75 |
 |
Title: A First Course in General Relativity by Bernard F. Schutz ISBN: 0521277035 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 31 January, 1985 List Price(USD): $45.00 |
 |
Title: The Quantum Theory of Fields: Volume 1, Foundations by Steven Weinberg ISBN: 0521550017 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 30 June, 1995 List Price(USD): $68.00 |
 |
Title: Schaum's Outline of Tensor Calculus (Schaum's) by David C. Kay ISBN: 0070334846 Publisher: McGraw-Hill Trade Pub. Date: 01 April, 1988 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
 |
Title: Problem Book in Relativity and Gravitation by A. Lightman, R. H. Price ISBN: 069108162X Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr Pub. Date: 01 December, 1975 List Price(USD): $50.00 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
