Thanks. I actually got started in Meisner, Thorne, and Wheeler, and it's a slog. I've asked some physicists if they know of an easier textbook, but there doesn't seem to be one. I'm a physicist too, but my willingness to build outrageous experiments made up for my lack of theoretical agility. Still, I'd love to understand gravitation.
I've still got my copy of Jackson from grad school. ;-)
Re:Eldar Black Holes
by auntienomen on Saturday February 24, 2018 @07:19PM
(#16456353)
There are lots of easier textbooks, all of them less...wordy. Wald's is the industry standard these days. Schutz, Carroll, and D'Inverno are all good introductions. If you're really pressed for time, Dirac wrote an intro to GR which is about as short as humanly possible. It omits most of the geometry though.
+1 for Wald - MTW is great, but it's really dense, and takes some odd approaches that are not really common in the field. Wald stays lean and tight, while still covering the important stuff.
You'll probably find MTW a lot more approachable after working through a few less beastly texts.
Thanks. I do want the geometry, but I just don't want to get killed by it. ;-)
I'm working through Sean Carroll's "Spacetime and Geometry". So far it's been quite accessible and is replete with exercises. Carroll's explanations do a really good job of motivating definitions while also introducing deeper, beautiful math. It's not all just tensor munging.
There is a TON of work done on BHs and the formulations to try to bend our knowledge of QM and 'classical' physics to them. If you really want to get into the nitty gritty of it start with this [1]. It's a HARD road, but the proofs and knowledge in the field is mindblowingly cool. Go for it!
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_electromagnetism
[1]https://www.amazon.com/Classical-Electrodynamics-Third-David...