Relativity text recommendation

The article “Teaching general relativity to undergraduates” by Nelson Christensen and Thomas Moore in the June 2012 issue of Physics Today (page 41 ) was very enjoyable. I think I should highlight for your readers an excellent book the authors did not mention in their list of recommended texts, namely General Relativity: An Introduction for Physicists by Michael Hobson, George Efstathiou, and Anthony Lasenby (Cambridge University Press, 2006; reviewed in Physics Today, March 2007, page 62 ).

I received my PhD in theoretical solid-state and low-temperature physics from Texas A&M University in 1978. After an industrial career at Boeing, I retired in 1999. I realized that I needed to stay in shape mentally and that there were extremely interesting areas of physics, including general relativity, about which I knew nothing.

I worked through Bernard Schutz’s A First Course in General Relativity (discussed in the article) and a couple of other standard texts. Then I discovered the book by Hobson and coauthors. A model of clarity and a joy to read, it is pedagogical and contains remarkably few errors and misprints. I was delighted to see that it includes chapters on the Kerr geometry, inflationary cosmology, and variational approaches to general relativity. One of the best textbooks I’ve read in any area of physics, it is the one I would use if I were teaching a course on general relativity or cosmology.