Spacetime and Geometry: An Introduction to General Relativity 1st Edition

Sean Carroll is a thoughtful cosmologist offering remarkable insights into contemporary physics and cosmology in his writings about time and general relativity. This book is one any of us who are not expert but want to develop at least an intuition about GR can use. Of those I've tried, including the respected weighty Gravity by Wheeler, this is far more accessible and ultimately effective.A small complaint, not about the book or its content, but about Amazon placing an adhesive sticker on the back. It spoiled a perfect tome, and some of the glue still remains on my copy. It is disrespectful of the book and the buyer to treat a new book this way, making it used and damaged even before shipping.

I bought this book to teach myself GR as it was the required text for the MIT opencourseware lectures. I would say the book flows decently well, but some basic concepts are left out, which are covered in the MIT lectures on YouTube. Additionally, I think a review of Altland's Mathematics for Physicists, just a few of the early linear algebra sections, is helpful to give a more formal explanation of the math that is used.

This is an outstanding textbook on general relativity. It's very detailed, well written and the order of the topics is very well chosen, covering a wide range of themes. The level is appropriate to graduate student, with a quite decent mathematical background.In particular, the first chapter is a review of special relativity: a brief but clear summary, useful to become familiar with the use of the 4-vector notation, too. The second and third chapters are committed to manifolds and curvature, and you have to learn the fundaments of differential geometry. The chapters from fourth to seventh are focused on the "real" general relativity, from Einstein's equation to gravitational waves: this is a quite advanced dissertation, and I think it is necessary to have a basic background from an introductory book. The last two chapters are an introduction to cosmology (brief, but pretty good) and an introduction to quantum field theory in curved spacetime (but I never read this chapter, sorry!).Remark that the book contains ten (10!) very useful appendixes on additional topics that are not debated in the ordinary chapters: they are a good extension to examine in depth some themes (in particular on a second reading).Very good binding and hardcover: it's durable and solid, with a good value for money.

Great book! But whoever was tasked to center these pages, failed miserably.

Last year, when I was at my Dad’s and stepmom’s house, I found the book “An Introduction to General Relativity, Spacetime and Geometry”, by Sean M Carroll. I was struck by the promise at the beginning of the preface: “.. it is an unalloyed joy to finally reach the point in one’s studies where these phenomena may be understood in a rigorous quantitative level. If you are contemplating reading this book, that point is here.” For me the book has lived up to this promise. I have been reading the book off and on since then and working some of the problems. I studied general relativity a little in college several decades ago, but there were many vague ideas floating in my head. This book has sharpened up the concepts, explained new ones, and connected them in a good way.

This book arrived promptly. My grandson is a math and physics major and is totally involved in reading! He. requested this and I was so pleased to find it on Amazon at great discount!!

A necessary read, Carroll's book is important to read and work through, after you go through Cheng's work and Hartle. For regular mechanics, I found that Taylor alone did the job nicely, but relativity is such a dense and diversely complex field that you really need to read about these three plus Wald and also maybe Hawkings book, as well as weinberg. This book has some good details that you don't get in some other books, particularly in later chapters on qft. I wouldn't say it's always the clearest, but it's a bit more sophisticated than some and a good supplement to other books. A nice feature is that it's short and condensed, so you don't spend too much time reading all the classic easy stuff that is only qualitative that many books spend pages describing. Carroll definitely knows his physics.

I purchased this book in 2004 finally got around to reading and doing the exercises this year ( such is the life of a professional poker player). I purchased the book as a review having already gone through MTW decades earlier but I was pleasantly surprised by the treatment of modern topics like the alternative theories and relation to string theory and QFT in curved space time. The math is excellent and my only objection to the book is that the errata page is not up to date - I have found the usuall amount of errors in any advanced physics book. This is a great graduate level introduction - not a reference work.