“Wald’s book is clearly the first textbook on general relativity with a totally modern point of view; and it succeeds very well where others are only partially successful. The book includes full discussions of many problems of current interest which are not treated in any extant book, and all these matters are considered with perception and understanding.
I do not doubt that Wald’s book will be required reading for anyone who wishes to have an understanding of the modern approaches to general relativity.”
-S. Chandrasekhar
“General Relativity is an excellent book, and it should fill a gap in the literature that has opened up, over the past several years, for a comprehensive and reasonably up-to-date graduate text in general relativity. The main strengths of this work lie in the way that the author is able to present the neces-sary basic material of a subject which has such a breadth of different kinds of tech-nique, ranging from the rather specialised and intricate differential topology and causal analysis that is needed for the singularity theorems, through tensor and 2-spinor calculus, to particle physics and astrophysics.”
-Roger Penrose
CONTENTS
Preface
Notation and Conventions
PART I FUNDAMENTALS
1. Introduction
2. Manifolds and Tensor Fields
3. Curvature
4. Einstein’s Equation
5. Homogeneous, Istropic Cosmology
6. The Schwarzschild Solution
PART II. ADVANCED TOPICS
7. Methods for Solving Einstein’s Equation
8. Causal Structure
9. Singularities
10. The Initial Value Formulation
11. Asymptotic Flatness
12. Black Holes
13. Spinors
14. Quantum Effects in Strong Gravitational Fields
APPENDICES
A. Topological Spaces
B. Differential Forms, Integration, and Frobenius’s Theorem
C. Maps of Manifolds, Lie Derivatives, and Killing Fields
D. Conformal Transformations
E. Lagrangian and Hamiltonian Formulations of Einstein’s Equation
F. Units and Dimensions
References
Index
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