General Relativity: 1972 Lecture Notes (Lecture Notes Series)

In the spring of 1972 when I was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago I had the great good fortune to attend a wonderful course of lectures on General Relativity given by professor Robert P. Geroch who was at that time newly arrived in Chicago from Princeton where he had been a PhD student of John Wheeler. The way in which that course was created remains an absolute amazement to me to this day. Professor Geroch would arrive at the lecture hall armed only with a single small white index card of notes, sometimes none at all, then pick up a piece of chalk and standing at the blackboard create a beautiful, clear explanation of some topic in General Relativity. When he was finished he would return to his office, roll carbon paper into his mechanical typewriter, and capture a prefect written version of the lecture which he had just given, then mimeograph it and hand it out at the next class meeting. As the class progressed through the spring quarter with lecture building upon lecture, a wonderful book on General Relativity took shape. I always expected that the University of Chicago Press would one day publish this book but for some reason it never did, and instead several generations of graduate students have had to content themselves with Xerox copies of these beautiful lecture notes instead. So you can imagine my surprise and delight when browsing Amazon one day to discover that the Minkowski Institute Press has published these notes as a book so that everyone can enjoy and learn from them.This book is the clearest, most concise introduction to the General Theory of Relativity ever written. Here you will find General Relativity developed from first principles using Geroch’s own unique and justly famous pedagogical approach to the subject. The geometrical spacetime reasoning is very intuitive and leads to a deeply satisfying understanding of the material. The coverage of topics is amazing for such a short volume. All the standard results including the Friedmann universes, the cosmological redshift, the Schwarzschild metric and the bending of light are derived in a compact, and elegant way. But the discussion also includes a large variety of advanced topics not usually found in a book at the introductory level. Chapter 34, for example, presents a simple proof of the singularity theorems that is really delightful.Any serious student of General Relativity should own this book. And while the book may be read to great benefit on its own, I would suggest if you are a serious student, that you first buy and work through the companion volume, Geroch’s 1972 Differential Geometry lecture notes which are also available in the same series from the Minkowski Institute Press. This is not required for reading the General Relativity lectures but it will certainly increase your understanding and enjoyment of them. And even if you are a mathematically sophisticated reader you should not neglect Geroch’s delightful little non-mathematical book, General Relativity From A to B, University of Chicago Press, which really should be read as a companion to the General Relativity lecture notes.If you want to learn General Relativity, then buy this book and work through it. You will be amazed at how much you learn in a short period of time, and the enduring value of the approach to the subject that it presents.

As usual with Geroch, his view is lucid, illuminating, slightly different to the usual and all the better for that. It's a welcome addition to the shelf of anyone interested in Relativity, and well worth a look especialy to those of us who've been around a bit.The only reason I'm not rating it at 5 stars is because the proof-reading has been rather sloppy: there are a larger number of typos than I would normally put up with.John Steele

I have great admiration, even reverence for Robert Geroch, and I was thrilled at the prospect of getting this book. The book for sale here is a reprint of his 1972 lecture notes. The reproduction, however, is poor - typos abound, often in the most critical places. Better to consult the PDF image of the original 1972 mimeographs which are available (for free) at [...]

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Excellent set of lectures by a great theoretical physicist.

As with all the robert geochemical lecture series the work is very interesting and pitched at a level that allows an interested mathematician to approach the subject.

Che Geroch abbia capito la Relativita' Einsteiniana come pochi altri lo sapevo. Temevo che il libro fosse un po' datato, sono passati 40 anni. Invece e' un libro ottimo, sembra scritto ieri, formalismo rigoroso ma mai pesante, concetti espressi e spiegati con grande chiarezza, unico appunto la metrica con segnatura positiva, io preferisco la metrica a segnatura negativa, ma e' una preferenza assolutamente personale. Consigliato a tutti coloro che vogliono imparare la Relativita' Generale e soprattutto a chi la deve insegnare nelle universita'.

The delivery service was great! Also, the book is very detailed and full of a lot of great information. Knowledge of college mathematics is however essential. For the serious student of relativity, this book is great.