Gravitation and Cosmology : Principles and Applications of the General Theory of Relativity

Rating:
Summary: A book based on the physics, not the mathematics
Review: After a completing graduate school, I decided it was time to learn GR on my own. I got Weinberg's book, and, at first reading, I was put off by it--there are effectively no diagrams, no problems, and no pedagogy. So on to Misner, Thorne, Wheeler. Well these kings have no clothes: MTW contains almost no clean, declarative sentences and could be reduced to 1/4 its size with straightforward editing. So I bought B. F. Schutz's book read it, and and went back to Weinberg's book. With both in hand, I am acquiring a satisfying understanding of GR. And I now realize that Weinberg's book is a masterpiece. As in all his texts, Weinberg's passion is to expose the underlying logic of the physics. All follows from the Equivalnce Princple, and this view gives his book a logic coherency that other's lack. (Try seeing where the Equivalence principle fits in Schutz's presentation.) One criticism: I believe that Weinberg was writing a text for his peers to set them straight about GR; he neglected students. It would have been great if he could have included a mathematical appendix or two to make the text more accessible. But even so, it is a wonderful book.

Rating:
Summary: Elegantly and concisely written
Review: I used this book in a class taught by its author. That makes it hard to disentangle the experience of taking the class from the book itself. However, I found this far more readable that Misner, Thorne, & Wheeler's ponderous tome. As enjoyable as I found Taylor & Wheeler's Spacetime Physics (written in a similar style), MTW is leaden in contrast to Weinberg's text. I had no problem with the notation: the rules for manipulating indices are quite straightforward and easy to apply. Furthermore, this is the notation used in a variety of other applications of tensors, from electrodynamics to mechanics (stress and moment of inertia tensors), so get used to it. As other reviewers have observed, one cannot help but think that MTW could have been edited down considerably; Weinberg's book is much tighter.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent treatment of GR - written for a physicist
Review: This is one of the finest GR books that is written for a physicist. Although it is slightly dated, it can still be profitably used today to learn the foundations of the subject that no other contemporary text has explained so clearly.

There is a strong emphasis on the equivalence principle in the book, and many interesting illustrations of this principle can be found throughout the book. There's no discussion of black holes, of course, since the book hasn't probably been revised since its publication in the early seventies. However, Weinberg's book can be truly judged based on the brilliant presentation of the physical ideas of GR in a way that is so familiar to the physicist. A mathematically minded physicist who cares little about real physical insights will be obviously disappointed by this book.