Eldar Black Holes

Re:Eldar Black Holes by analog31 on Saturday February 24, 2018 @06:38PM (#16456158)

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. ;-)

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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.

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Re:Eldar Black Holes by ewjordan on Saturday February 24, 2018 @08:49PM (#16456658)

+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.

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Re:Eldar Black Holes by analog31 on Saturday February 24, 2018 @08:39PM (#16456626)

Thanks. I do want the geometry, but I just don't want to get killed by it. ;-)

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Re:Eldar Black Holes by xelxebar on Sunday February 25, 2018 @01:26AM (#16457465)

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.

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