Lecture Notes

Special and General Relativity

  • Lecture Notes

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  • Problem Sets

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  • References and Further Reading

    • G. S. Asanov, Finsler Geometry, Relativity and Gauge Theories, D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1985
    Michael V. Berry, Principles of Cosmology and Gravitation, Cambridge University Press, 1976
    Matthias Blau, Lecture Notes on General Relavitiy, 950+ pages as of October 2019!
    William M. Boothby, An Introduction to Differentiable Manifolds and Riemannian Geometry, Academic Press, 1986
    Sean Carroll, Spacetime and Geometry: An Introduction to General Relativity, Pearson, 2016

    This book grew out of Sean Carroll's much earlier Lecture notes on General Relativity.

    Elie Cartan, On Manifolds with an Affine Connection and the Theory of General Relativity, Bibliopolis, 1986
    Heino Falcke and Friedrich W. Hehl (Eds.), The Galactic Black Hole, Lectures on general relativity and astrophysics, Series in High Energy Physics, Cosmology and Gravitation, Institute of Physics Publishing, 2003
    F. De Felice and C. J. S. Clark, Relativity on Curved Manifolds, Cambridge University Press, 1990

    This book contains a good bit of materials on differential geometry.

    Giampiero Esposito, Complex General Relativity, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002
    Heino Falcke and Friedrich W. Hehl, The Galactic Black Hole, Lectures on general relativity and astrophysics, Institute of Physics Publishing, 2003
    Valeri P. Frolov and Igor D. Novikov, Black Hole Physics: Basic Concepts and New Developments, 1997
    Walter Greiner, Classical Mechanics, Point Particles and Relativity, Springer, 2004
    S. W. Hawking and G. F. R. Ellis, The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time, Cambridge University Press, 1973

    Not for the faint of heart.

    L. P. Hughston and K. P. Tod, An Introduction to General Relativity, Cambridge University Press, 1990
    Charles W. Misner, Kip S. Thorne and John Archibald Wheeler, Gravitation, W. H. Freeman and Company, 1973

    A pretty big book with more than 1300 pages. This book is dubbed the bible of general relativity.

    Barrett O'Neill, Semi-Riemannian Geometry with Applications to Relativity, Academic Press, 1983
    A. Papapetrou, Lectures on General Relativity, D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1974

    This book also contains a good bit of materials on differential geometry.

    Eric Poisson, A Relativist's Toolkit, The Mathematics of Black-Hole Mechanics, Cambridge University Press, 2004
    Luciano Rezzolla, Gravitational Waves from Perturbed Black Holes and Relativistic Stars
    Hans Stephani, Relativity, An Introduction to Special and General Relativity, 3rd Edition, Cambridge University Press, 2004
    Advanced General Relativity, John Stewart, Cambridge University Press, 1991
    Norbert Straumann, General Relativity and Relativistic Astrophysics, Springer-Verlag, 1984
    P.K. Townsend, Black Holes
    Kip Thorne and Stephen Hawking (Foreword), Black Holes and Time Warps, Einstein's Outrageous Legacy, W. W. Norton & Company, 1995
    Paul A. Tipler and Ralph A. Llewellyn, Modern Physics, 5th Edition, W. H. Freeman and Company, 2008
    Richard C. Tolman, Relativity, Thermodynamics and Cosmology, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1934

    This is a wonderful classical book on the subject and is still well-worth reading.

    Richard C. Tolman, The Theory of the Relativity of Motion, University of California Press, 1917.

    A scanned copy is available for viewing online here.

    Lorentzian Wormholes, From Einstein to Hawking, Matt Visser, AIP Series in Computational and Applied Mathematical Physics, 2008
    Robert M. Wald, General Relativity, The University of Chicago Press, 1984