Highly recommend Dirac's GR book as a compact check of understanding from those other, more verbose treatments.
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Gravitation is denser than GToR
edit: whoops. i confused this post with another post i made on stack exchange. (railed on half an eight ball atm)
i would also recomend GToR. but why are you contrasting the recommendation of a GR text to a discussion of prerequisite math texts? GR requires a lot of math which is what this post was about
Obviously, but anyone getting through Dirac is well on their way through Gravitation. Relatedly, what are your thoughts on MTW?
an incredibly dense text, particularly when I first encountered it. I bought it as a little kid w/o even knowing what a tensor was. I didn’t (couldn't possibly) make a serious effort with it until over a decade later. By then, I was solid in diff geo, tensor analysis, and actually GR in general.
I actually wish I'd started earlier with MWT since it offers a better treatment of these topics than the scattered resources I'd seen by that time
Weinberg was a reviewer/advisor for me (at UT Austin) and recommended that I make a concerted effort to dive into MTW. His timing was good, as att I was studying PDEs & CoV, which helped me with lots of stuff like einstein-hilbert action/least action principles/variational methods/etc.
I always advise synthesizing knowledge from multiple angles, particularly with GR and relativistic QM in curved spacetime (QFT etc.) MTW is, imo, one of the better angles.
Very cool, I mostly agree with that. I also studied under Weinberg but ultimately ended up with a different advisor. Nice to see a fellow UT alum around.
small world!
Who are these legions of fans beating down your metaphorical door for your wisdom? Are you some celebrity scientist like Bill Nye? I don't even know who you are, other then perhaps a prolific NG forum poster. If you get this irate over people uneducated in physics asking the wrong physics questions then you really must have no real problems to worry about.
Huh? Are you literally nothing but a stream of consciousness? There's no real direction to your thoughts. Absolutely nothing you said had any basis in reality. It just seemed like you squirming your way around in the dark trying to find some rationale for insulting me.
Ka-ne
WOW, you sound passionate about what you do.
Maybe I'll read those books, they sound interesting.