General Relativity is a graduate textbook and reference written by the gravitational physicist Robert Wald. It provides a mathematically rigorous and thorough introduction to Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity.
Contents
Overview
Published by the University of Chicago Press in 1984, the book of almost 500 pages covers many aspects of the theory of General Relativity. It is divided into two parts: Part I covers the fundamentals of the subject, and Part II covers more advanced topics such as causal structure, and quantum effects. The book uses the abstract index notation for tensors. It covers spinors, the variational-principle formulation, the initial-value formulation, (exact) gravitational waves, singularities, Penrose diagrams, Hawking radiation, and black-hole thermodynamics.
It is aimed at beginning graduate students and researchers. To this end, most of the material in Part I is geared towards an introductory course on the subject, while Part II covers a wide range of advanced topics for a second term or further study. The essential mathematical methods for the formulation of general relativity are presented in Chapters 2 and 3, while more advanced techniques are discussed in Appendices A to C. Wald believes that this is the best way forward because putting all the mathematical techniques at the beginning of the book would prove to be a major obstruction for students, while developing these mathematical tools as they get used would mean they are too scattered to be useful. While the Hamiltonian formalism is often presented in conjunction with the initial-value formulation, Wald covers these topics independently, with Hamiltonian relegated to the appendix, alongside the Lagrangian formalism.