The General Relativity Tutorial

John Baez

If you want, you can dive right in and read the adventures of

• Oz and the Wizard

But, unless you are already familiar with general relativity, to follow these adventures you'll need to look at other material from time to time, like this:

• Short Course Outline

• Long Course Outline

A more formal presentation of all this material can be found here:

• The Meaning of Einstein's Equation

The adventures of Oz and the Wizard originated on the newsgroup sci.physics. Much of them were written by Oz and I, but there are also substantial contributions by Ted Bunn, Ed Green, Keith Ramsay, Bruce Scott, Bronis Vidugiris, and Michael Weiss.

You can also get

• Transcripts of the General Relativity Tutorial

General relativity is usually written with lots of superscripts and subscripts. Mitchell Charity has kindly improved these web pages so that they look nice. However, not all old web browsers can handle this. If you don't see the word ^{`superscript'} raised in this sentence, click here, and you will get the old version of these pages, without nice-looking superscripts and subscripts.

What Next?

Unfortunately, the best books on general relativity still cost money. But, they're worth the price. So:

Here are four nontechnical introductions, all quite different in flavor. You can't really learn the details of general relativity from these books, but they're written by world-class experts, and they're a great way to get an intuitive feel for the subject:

• Kip S. Thorne, Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy, W. W. Norton, New York, 1994.

• Robert Geroch, General Relativity from A to B, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1978.

• Bernard F. Schutz, Gravity from the Ground Up: An Introductory Guide to Gravity and General Relativity, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003.

• Robert M. Wald, Space, Time, and Gravity: the Theory of the Big Bang and Black Holes, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1977.

Before you get serious about learning general relativity, it helps to have special relativity down cold. For this, try:

• Edwin F. Taylor, John A. Wheeler, Spacetime Physics: Introduction to Special Relativity, W. H. Freeman Press, New York, 1992.

When you're ready to actually dive into general relativity, you might start with one of these books:

• Ray d'Inverno, Introducing Einstein's Relativity, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1992.

• James B. Hartle, Gravity: an Introduction to Einstein's General Relativity, Addison-Wesley, New York, 2002.

• Ian R. Kenyon, General Relativity, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1991.

• Bernard F. Schutz, A First Course in General Relativity, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1986.

• Hans Stephani, General Relativity: An Introduction to the Theory of the Gravitational Field, Cambridge U. Press, Cambridge, 1990.

And when you want to really master general relativity, you'll have to read the classics:

• Charles W. Misner, Kip S. Thorne and John Archibald Wheeler, Gravitation, W. H. Freeman Press, San Francisco, 1973.

• Robert M. Wald, General Relativity, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1984.

If you want to bone up on your geometry before getting deeper into general relativity you should check out:

• Barrett O'Neill, Semi-Riemannian Geometry: with Applications to Relativity, Academic Press, New York, 1983.

To be honest, I must admit to having written a book dealing with general relativity myself:

• John Baez and Javier P. de Muniain, Gauge Fields, Knots, and Gravity, World Scientific Press, Singapore, 1994.

It concentrates on the mathematics of general relativity and other gauge fields, such as Maxwell's equations and the Yang-Mills equations, which describe the strong and electroweak forces.

© 2006 John Baez
[email protected]

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