Einstein Gravity in a Nutshell

I am rewriting this review. I have my PhD. so take that into account. The Perimeter Institute has lectures on-line. They are good lectures on OFT, String Theory, General Rel. and other subjects like Quantum Gravity. The students being taught in the videos, already have their undergraduate degrees so take that into account if you watch those lectures. Neil Turok, teaches Gen. Rel. in those lectures. He referrers to this book several times. This is a special book, one written not only from the point of math but from a point of incite. You think you understand Special Rel., well Mr. Zee will confuse you again and then straighten you out. Professors who teach Quantum Field Theory wonder why students have so much trouble with it. Special Rel. it part of the reason. Variational methods are another. Zee teaches both. If you go through this whole book you can take OFT and not have any problem with it. It prepares you for OFT, General Rel(Like Walds book) and string theory.This is a thick book and you will need a buddy to help you carry it around. I used to think thick books were bad, but not anymore. Zee takes the time to explain things so you can understand the subject and that takes time or a thicker book. For example the Paradox of special rel. Since in Spec. Rel. there is no absolute reference frame both observers can look at the other and say the other one is moving. Therefore both observers will say the others clocks are moving slow. Zee shows how to reason out what is really happening.He uses Cartan's equations and introduces differential forms. This book is the bridge between undergrad. physics and Grad. level physics. He shows how to properly do rotations. Shows where some equations you will need for OFT come from like the variance of a determinate and so forth. I learned form this book, you never know a subject as well as you think, without constant exposure to that subject. I think even Neil Turok used it in some of his lectures and got something out of it. Neil must have read parts of it.This is not your fathers textbook. This one explains the physics and does not hesitate to use and explain the math needed. This is not the General textbook where you are given an equation and just magically expected to know the twenty steps it took to get there. Zee makes you think but he does tries to lead you as much as possible.About the Perimeter Institute site, look it up. Barton Zwieback who wrote "A first course in String Theory", gives a set of lectures on string theory, on that site. This textbook will not be special in about ten years, because I think all Physics books will be written in this style, so they can be understood. No more guessing how the Author got from point a to point b. The only way you really learn the subject is when you have to apply it. But before that you need the exposure to the subject and a lot of exposure. That is what getting a degree is all about anyway. Then when you need it you can look it up and figure it out. This book really serves that purpose.It seems the older textbooks objective was to make you feel stupid, but you would not be reading the book if you understood the subject. I think this kind of Textbook will force other writers to write a physics text that the reader can understand and not make him/her feel stupid. Someone needs to come up with a word that means him/her or her/him.Enjoy the book, it is a fun journey and even has some jokes in it. Physics now seems to me like I always knew it, but I did not. Sometimes after you know something well you forget that there are people out there who do not understand it. Authors of the future must remember what it was like when they were taking a course for the first time. I had loads of troubles when I was learning the subject and sometimes I forget that. It is like forgetting what it was like to be a child. We all do it but the Authors of technical books must force themselves to remember what it was like when they took the course for the first time. I think Zee understands this.And remember after you finish all this physics you will become a veg. None of your family or friends will have any idea what you are talking about. And do not bring up thermodynamics when talking about the weather, or optics when looking at a rainbow. I beg you to stop now, become a normal member of society. People will think you are a freak because you do all that math and know how a magnet works but cannot explain it because they do not have the training to understand it. Get a business degree and make money. Please stop now or you will become a freak.Nothing has given me more joy than physics well maybe on other thing. Those moments when you get it are the biggest high one can get, no other degree really offers that high. Even if you learn on your own when it all finally starts to come together is the best feeling in the world. And there is more to come, as Bob Dylan would say, "Things they are a changing." This is one of those books that can cause many ah-ha moments. This book alone will not do it. Go on and read Carroll and Wald.Good Luck

I learned general relativity from the old 1965 Adler-Bazin-Schiffer introductory text, which at the time was the best available. Then Misner-Wheeler-Thorne's Gravitation book came out in 1973 which, though commendable, was basically an advanced graduate-level text. Since then many more general relativity books have appeared, but to me none as useful as ABS.Now we have Anthony Zee's Einstein Gravity in a Nutshell. There is nothing to compare with it, and whether you are an undergraduate who wants to get some general relativity under her belt, a graduate student seeking more advanced topics for study, or a professor getting ready to teach the subject, then by all means buy this book.What is truly amazing about Zee's book is its sheer breadth and scope of everything general relativity touches, from black holes to electromagnetism to dark energy to string theory and far, far beyond. Zee has thrown everything in here, including the kitchen sink, and the only way he could keep it down to 865 pages was to typeset a major portion of the book in smallish print.I haven't counted, but there must be thousands of equations in the text, most of which Zee takes you by the hand through, but there are also many challenging exercises that Zee assumes the student can handle alone.Perhaps best of all is Zee's entertaining way of writing. He can be deep and profound as well as clever and funny, and his many anecdotes, sprinkled throughout the text, give the reader a sense of the sheer awe and wonder that he and hundreds of other great physicists have experienced since Einstein's 1915 announcement of his general relativity theory.Other than the fact that it could take years to work one's way through the entire book and its derivations and exercises, I could find no fault with the book. After many hours of reading, I could find only one typo in the text -- on Page 490, Zee misspells "ad nauseam."Though not as advanced as the 40-year-old MWT book (which I was hard pressed to learn anything from anyway), Zee's book simply stands far and above everything else that's out there.

After a long string of thoughts I have decided to be audacious enough to write a single opinion on all the three “nutshell” books, i. e. “ Quantum field theory in a nutshell”, “ Einstein gravity in a nutshell” and “Group theory in a nutshell for physicists”:In my humble opinion, while the books written by Dr. Zee are quite fun to read and gain (sometimes) a different perspective on the subject, these books in no way are the books from which to learn the corresponding stuff (QFT, general relativity or group theory) if you had no previous exposure to them, even if you know all the needed maths. In other words, they are *no textbooks* from which to begin your journey into these beautiful but quite difficult theories. For one, these books have so many stuff in them that, in order to get the “meat” out of them, you will have to “hack” through a lot of material and, for sure, will have to use quite a number of other books and/or lecture notes for the reference. But, after you have gained the basic understanding from other sources and can easily comprehend the matter being discussed, these books are very valuable source of many unorthodox observations about the subjects and are also good reference books on many intricacies which are not usually discussed in textbooks and lectures.

Recebi há poucos minutos. Livro de capa dura, paginação e impressão excelentes. Todos os assuntos importantes sobre a teoria geral da relatividade estão no livro.

The style and quality of the book is similar to QFT In a Nutshell, maybe even better. You can check my review of that book. https://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R7RQUUPX7MQZG/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm?ie=UTF8The books starts with the very basic stuff, deriving some results about Newton laws. Don't be deceived - this book is not for first year students, some of the material in the latest parts may not even be familiar to professionals. But whether Zee explains Newton orbits, or twistors and possible connections between Einstein's gravity and Yang-Mills, the style of the explanations is absolutely stunning. Even if you have already studied some of the material before, just read this material in Zee's version anyway. For instance, I particularly enjoyed "the alternative physics history" detours, where Zee explains how some of the basic physical theories could be invented in the alternative universe. Some of this chapters introduce possible ways to derive certain theories in an unconventional but much more obvious way. Isn't this good - to understand the subject on such a level, where it starts to seem obvious?

Ich bin begeistert über diese Buch. Es gibt nur wenige Physikbücher, die didaktisch so hervorragend geschrieben sind. Der Autor erarbeitet Schritt für Schritt die notwendige Basis (Riemann Geometrie, Noether Theorem, Euler-Lagrange Gleichungen, etc.), um diese komplexe Physik und Mathematik verstehen zu können. Ich finde dieses Buch wesentlich verständlicher und logischer aufgebaut, als das schon recht alte Standardwerk "Gravitation" von Misner, Thornton, Wheeler. Insbesondere der Ansatz, die Physikalische Wirkung als Ausgangspunkt der Theorie herzunehmen, war für mich sehr erhellend.

I've self-studied 70 pages so far and the book is indeed exciting and amazingly well written ... BUT as always: the manual of solutions is only for teachers. Sincerely: I do not understand why someone who studies the book (me) and therefore is supposed to have problems to solve the exercises can't get a solutions book, and, on the contrary, the professors, supposed connoisseurs of this subject, can.Someday somebody will explain this paradox to me: solutions for teachers and NOT for students who try to self-studie this diffcult subject. Strange world indeed.Llevo 70 páginas y el libro en efecto es apasionante.... peeeeero como siempre: el manual de soluciones es solo para profesores. Sinceramente: yo no entiendo por qué alguien que estudia el libro (yo) y por tanto se supone que necesita conocer si hace bien o no los ejercicios no tiene libro. Y los profesores, supuestos conocedores de esta materia, sí lo tienen.A mí que alguien me lo explique...

un libro completo e chiaro, di livello intermedio, con un approccio moderno e più fisico dell'ostico Wald