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/sci/ - Science & Math


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15754355 No.15754355 [Reply] [Original]

I got a copy of Gravitation by MTW from the thrift store. Is it still relevant? What are the most recent books on the subject?

>> No.15754404

Kip Thorne is an aggressive pedophile

>> No.15755431

>>15754355
Don't study relativity, it's physically incorrect seeing as how Einstein plagiarized his work from others. Study something practical like solid state, stay grounded.

>> No.15755439

>>15754355
To add, if relativity was correct, then why is it being revised continously with still so many uncertainties? By relativity i mean general relativity, special relativity is proven correct due to all the applications.

>> No.15755519

>>15754355
Don't listen to the crackpots. MTW is considered a classic and there have been no major developments in classical general relativity that would cause it to be outdated. I personally have never read MTW and learned general relativity from Sean Carroll's book Spacetime and Geometry, which I would recommend. I also have read Wald's textbook which involves more physical calculations but introduces the math in a worse way than Carroll (I think. It's hard to say since I already knew the math when I read it.)

>> No.15755985

>>15754355
I understand it's value and scope, but holy shit is it verbose to the point of nausea. They just go on random tangents and wishy-washy descriptions, which is really why the book is so fucking huge.

I would say Landau-Lifshitz GR chapters of Volume 2 (The Classical Theory of Fields) are way better if you want to accustom yourself with the guts of the theory. It suffers from the opposite problem as it can be very dry at times.

Wald's General Relativity sits somewhere in between the two and I would suggest that if you're interested in purely classical gravity and its geometric interpretation.

If you are a QFT autist like me, Weinberg's Gravitation is the perfect match. It formulates GR as a field theory first, geometric theory second. It makes connections between gravity and other fundamental forces of nature way more apparent if you're going after that.

Finally, let's not forget The Meaning of Relativity by the man himself. It's a very short, but digestible read that explains the guts of the theory a la Landafshitz, but in an even more concise manner. It does not, however, go into cosmology (obviously) and only covers precession of Mercury, light deflection around the Sun, and how EM enters into the field equations. The edition I got also treats time as an imaginary component in Euclidian space, which is not how modern theorists treat it as there are problems with this approach.

>> No.15756045

>>15755985
>It makes connections between gravity and other fundamental forces of nature way more apparent
Such connections are strictly a sham, given the present state of knowledge

>> No.15756076

>>15756045
I'm sure you can tells us about the present states of Poincare representation theory, path integration, field quantization, QED, QCD, gauge theory, spontaneous symmetry breaking, one-loop semiclassical gravity, the renormalization group, and ADM formulation of GR; couldn't you, Mr Crackpot?

>> No.15757008

>>15755985
>They just go on random tangents and wishy-washy descriptions
This, a lot of physics textbooks are like that.