Spacetime and Geometry: An Introduction to General Relativity

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.

It's a high quality book that makes you enjoy reading it. The author is an expert no doubt. The subject is deep but Dr Sean makes it possible to follow a very good portion of the book even with no prior knowledge or experience in the subject at all.

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!!

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 is one of the best books on general relativity. In my opinion it is somewhere between the classic Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler tome and Wald's General Relativity in its mathematical requirements. I like the tone of the discussion of topics. It is comprehensive enough to be useful in applications and leading to more advanced studies.

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.

Very clear explanations of the beautiful geometric basis of General relativity. particularly the tratment of curvature, geodesics and the Schwarzschild metric in chapter 5.

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.

O livro parece ter a melhor abordagem pra iniciantes mas que sabem o mínimo.

La pasta tiene un acabado muy elegante, y las hojas tienen un acabado diferente, no es papel común pero no está del todo laminado. Recomendado.

De los mejores libros de GR que he visto hasta ahora.Muy recomnendable.

Was mir als Mathematiker besonders auffällt ist, dass Carroll zwar mit der Brille des Physikers schreibt, aber offenbar über ein profundes mathematisches Hintergrundwissen in Sachen Tensorrechnung, Riemannschen und Semi-Riemannschen Mannigfaltigkeiten verfügt, was man an vielen Stellen im Buch feststellt. Das Werk ist - im Unterschied zu vielen anderen Standardwerken - flüssig zu lesen. Die Anhänge sind äußerst interessant. Dem Mathematiker sind ergänzend John M. Lee "Riemannian Manifolds" und Barrett O'Neill "Semi-Riemannian Geometry - with Applications in Relativity" zu empfehlen.

Worth and interesting concepts