My Goodreads Rating: 3 of 5 stars
Trying to teach undergrads general relativity is about as easy as teaching a puppy… general relativity. Hartle strikes a pretty good balance with this book, offering 30-page chapters with *gasp* only a half-dozen equations that focus on conveying high-level concepts as well as chapters fully devoted to tensors, covariant derivatives, and all the mathematical weapons one needs to predict the large-scale structure of the universe. Hartle also provides plenty of worked examples, which are really useful for understanding how to go about GR calculations (which are a new beast for most undergrads unfamiliar with tensor algebra).
When your subject matter includes black holes, wormholes, and space travel, it would be difficult not to make up examples that make a young physicist wriggle with glee, but Hartle does do an especially good job of providing engaging problems (e.g. about space pirates patrolling black hole horizons).
However, I too often felt like a child touring a farm and being hushed and rushed past the slaughterhouse; there always seemed to be something more complicated going on behind the scenes that Hartle wasn’t telling me about. The book moved very (too?) slowly at first but halfway through the book, I felt like I had skipped a few sections. This uneasy feeling is perhaps expected on a first voyage through interstellar spacetime, but I’m eager for a less-nauseating return trip, during which I can spend more time appreciating the view.
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