Modern General Relativity: Black Holes, Gravitational Waves, and Cosmology

This book gives an up-to-date overview of current research on General Relativity. In addition, the book has several factors that recommend it for both beginners and PhD-level students in other fields of Physics.The book has several chapters that provide simplified derivations of the theoretical results. For instance, a chapter provides simplified derivations of results like time dilatation, gravitational redshift, and bending of light trajectories in weak gravitational fields using only the generalized equivalence principle. This kind of simple derivation is a valuable addition to more mathematical treatments.However, the most valuable (to me) aspect of the book is the discussion of many recent tests and experimental applications of General Relativity. The chapter on the empirical evidence for black holes and the chapters about gravitational waves provide reports on recent developments with many references. And lots of helpful illustrations, I have to add.The book also uses a consistent set of measurement units, making the mathematical expressions less mysterious to the beginner.A caveat. Both the Kindle and the print versions have problems. The print version uses smaller than usual characters, making the book hard to read for people with poor vision. The Kindle version is almost useless as the equations are microscopic and cannot be expanded in any way, even if you use a large e-book reader like an iPad. Consequently, I avoided the Kindle version and used the print version I bought from Amazon and the PDF version I obtained directly from the publisher.

As a Ph.D student in pure mathematics I had a strong"minor" in theoretical physics. I cut my general relativity eye teeth onHawking and Ellis and on Misner, Thorne and Wheeler. But my mathematical training as per Bourbaki has to this day given me a propensity to become so involved in the mathematics of physical theory that I often surface after hours of theorems proofs, lemmas, and propositions and wonder what I've done or learned.The trees obscure the forest. I find Guidry's text a masterful antidote to my affliction. If you are a fellow sufferer, I would recommend reading Guidry before, say, Wald and not conversely. If you want more mathematical depth, do the problems!The author's style makes the text fun to read. Who ever said that blood, sweat and tears are requirements for learning?I thoroughly enjoyed the derivation of the bending of light, the red shift, and time dilation in a gravitational field using only the Strong Equivalence Principle without the full machinery of GR. I would say facetiously (and paraphrasing Feynman) that if one does not see the beauty in this, one has no soul!This text is a labor of love in all respects. It's even fun to hold!

I have just started to read Guidry's textbook, having alreadymade serious attempts to read other recent textbookson general relativity such as those of Tai-Pei Cheng, Hartle,Schutz, D'Inverno, Zee, and Carroll, for example.So far I am impressed by the contents of Guidry's book, includingsuperb writing and a lack of typographical errors.Some of its features include:1. A collection of 259 references in the back of the book.2. Care about the the use of natural units.3. A clear comment about the breakdown of the principle of global conservationof energy in general relativity because of the difficult of accountingfor gravitational energy.4. An up-to-date summary of the current standard model, including recentcalculations of the evolution of the universe (13.8 Gyr) using recentbenchmark parameters.5. Two chapters devoted to gravitational waves.6. Helpful footnotes.7. Homework problems with partial solutions (PDF)on the Cambridge Univ. Press website.One problem for people like me with poor eyesight: the font used in this book isabout 10 percent smaller than the 11-point type one sees in physics textbooks.Guidry's book contains 598 pages, so this is only a first impressionbut so far, so good.

Recibí el libro a mi entera satisfacción y al hojearlo me parece un muy buen producto. Quedé muy satisfecho con él.

I only wish when it comes equations, which show up very small here, someone could figure out how to make LaTex work!

I applaud the author for trying to convey intuition, but he doesn't succeed. His derivations are so vague and wandering they border on incomprehensible. He constantly uses equations to define terms that are already defined (inconsistent), or uses terms that are not defined at all. He jumps forward and backward, making it difficult to follow an argument. Derivations are very loose and sloppy. Ultimately instead of conveying intuition the meandering derivations just create confusion. Misses the mark.

This is definitely one of the best books for GR I've encountered. The author even provide a PDF file on the web with solutions for selected exercises. I just regret that the electronic version is not good. When you download the free trial sample, the fonts, equations and diagrams a sized balanced and everything looks good. However, we you purchase it, things are not properly balanced - equations too small or too big, the same with the pictures. I tried to read in my ipad but it is a pain. I returned the electronic version and will try the hard copy.