General Relativity

General Relativity is a graduate textbook and reference on Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity written by the gravitational physicist Robert Wald. Overview First published by the University of Chicago Press in 1984, the book, a tome of almost 500 pages, covers many aspects of the general theory of relativity. It is divided into two parts. Part I covers the fundamentals of the subject and Part II the more advanced topics such as causal structure, and quantum effects. The book uses the abstract index notation for tensors. It treats spinors, the variational-principle formulation, the initial-value formulation, (exact) gravitational waves, singularities, Penrose diagrams, Hawking radiation, and black-hole thermodynamics. It is aimed at beginning graduate students and researchers. To this end, most of the materials in Part I is geared towards an introductory course on the subject while Part II covers a wide range of advanced topics for a second term or further study. The essential mathematical methods for the formulation of general relativity are presented in Chapters 2 and 3 while more advanced techniques are discussed in Appendices A to C. Wald believes that this is the best way forward because putting all the mathematical techniques at the beginning of the book would prove to be a major obstruction for students while developing these mathematical tools as they get used would mean they are too scattered to be useful. While the Hamiltonian formalism is often presented in conjunction with the initial-value formulation, Wald's coverage of the latter is independent of the former, which is thus relegated to the appendix, alongside the Lagrangian formalism. This book uses the sign convention for reasons of technical convenience. However, there is one important exception. In Chapter 13 – and only in Chapter 13 –, the sign convention is switched to because it is easier to treat spinors this way. Moreover, this is the most common sign convention used in the literature.