Introduction to General Relativity 1st Edition by Lewis Ryder (PDF)

Description

A student-friendly style, over 100 illustrations, and numerous exercises are brought together in this textbook for advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students in physics and mathematics. Lewis Ryder develops the theory of general relativity in detail. Covering the core topics of black holes, gravitational radiation, and cosmology, he provides an overview of general relativity and its modern ramifications. The book contains chapters on gravitational radiation, cosmology, and connections between general relativity and the fundamental physics of the microworld. It explains the geometry of curved spaces and contains key solutions of Einstein’s equations – the Schwarzschild and Kerr solutions. Mathematical calculations are worked out in detail, so students can develop an intuitive understanding of the subject, as well as learn how to perform calculations. The book also includes topics concerned with the relation between general relativity and other areas of fundamental physics.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐The fonts are quite small and hard to read in my case. But this book is good for beginninggraduate students. It can serve as an easy and simple introduction to general relativity.

⭐Although Ryder’s book is riddled with typos (mostly in index manipulations) and lacks detail on many advanced topics, it does contain some of the clearest explanations and detailed derivations of any GR book out there. The author provides ample illustrations and motivation for more abstract concepts, such as curvature, before diving into the math in order to make the results easier to comprehend. Furthermore, he gives several examples, like calculating the components of the curvature tensor via differential forms, that I have never seen in other GR books but are definitely instructive. Most importantly, Ryder gives some of the clearest (though occasionally pedestrian) explanations of technical concepts that take the student beyond mindless manipulations of mathematical symbols. There were numerous instances when reading this book that I remarked “that’s what all the other authors were trying to explain but couldn’t.” For this, Ryder’s book is a good place to start learning GR at the advanced undergraduate level before moving on to more formal and rigorous texts. It’s probably not suitable as a formal textbook for a course, but it is invaluable for actually understanding the material, a statement that does not apply to the vast majority of unnecessary GR books out there. Ryder and Hartle are the perfect starting point before moving on to Wald, whose masterpiece remains unequaled.

⭐I complained about another review that trashed this book and didn’t give specific examples. Now that I have read most of it, I will give them.“The Principle of General Covariance is a mathematical statement of the Equivalence Principle.” … absolute garbage. General covariance is just the use of tensors to write coordinate-independent equations, and has been found to define no new physics. The Equivalence Principle as used by Einstein is that all laws of physics are identical in any inertial OR free fall frame (later he added “if sufficiently small”). Ryder butchers the fundamental postulates so badly the book should be discarded on that alone.Later he uses other incomplete explanations and the harder to follow of the two main derivations of the field equation (Hilbert’s version not Einstein’s). I’d say get D’Inverno for starters and Misner-Thorne-Wheeler for a reference, both of which you can find downloadable on the internet.

⭐I have only gone through a few pages so far, but it seems to contain lots of (typing?, calculation?, conceptual?) errors!Too bad. I liked the QFT book of the same author.

⭐This book contains conceptual and calculational errors. It contains nothing new, and the level is also not very high. It is also not pedagogical, for example the chapter about newer mathematics in Relativity is confusing. There are many better books on General Relativity, like for example the books of James Hartle, Landau+Lifshitz, Adler+Bazin+Shiffer and of course the very complete book of Misner+Thorne+Wheeler. In this sense, the book of Ryder is irrelevant. To learn Relativity on a solid and a higher level basis , one should not use this book.

⭐This book arrived on time, and came in excellent condition.It was a big help when I was taking a General Relativity course for my undergraduate studies, since it covered all the basic concepts. Also, it covered other topics which my course didn’t (e.g. time dilation), so ordering this book was worth it.

⭐This book covers a lot of material (the focus is on applications of general relativity starting from the fifth chapter after the einstein equations are introduced).The maine problem with this book is that there are many typos on practically every page. So many that the professor would give us bonus points each time we found mistakes (and a lot of bonus points were given). Sometimes, you also find big mistakes in the development of a calculation. Also, it is not uncommon for the author to give very misleading justifications for certain approximations made throughout the text, especially on chapter 5 covering the tests of general relativity.Another complaint would be that the mathematics lacks rigour. In my opinion, for a student learning general relativity for the first time (as this book is intended to be an introduction), the most important thing is to have a solid foundation in tensor analysis. I was lucky to have taken a course in tensor analysis before the GR course. The explanation on one forms is just awful. Had I only read this book, I would not have a solid understanding of one forms and would simply follow along the calculations without really knowing what I would be doing. The notation used for covariant derivatives is quite strange and unfamiliar. Most research papers and other textbooks do not use the same notation (with a comma instead of a del operator!!!). I would also like to note that the authors explanation of covariant derivatives are unacceptable since they do not give an intuitive notion of what they really are.If a student would really like to learn the foundations of tensor analysis to have a confident understanding of general relativity, I would recommend Wald’s book.On a positive note, the author often gives detailed explanations to certain topics that are not covered in detail in other textbooks. There is a good chapter on black holes, the Schwarzschild metric and its applications are discussed in great detail. also, the gyromagnetic experiment of GR is discussed in great detail along with the Kerr metric.To conclude, this book is wonderful for applications of general relativity but awful for having a solid understanding of the material.

⭐Uno dei migliori testi di relatività generale per studenti della magistrale: utilizza un formalismo moderno, geometrico e dà la giusta quantità di strumenti matematici per imparare ad utilizzare i tensori e a maneggiare le formule di relatività generale. Consigliato.One of the best book addressed to Master’s students: it used a modern, geometrical formalism, giving the right amount of mathematical tools to learn how to use tensors and handle GR formulas. Higly suggested.Ryder ist eigentlich für sein Buch über die Quantenfeldtheorie bekannt. Doch auch das über die ART kann sich sehen lassen! Es wird auf einfachem Wege eine gute Einführung in das Gebiet der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie gegeben.

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