Gravitation: Foundations and Frontiers

Book Preface

There is a need for a comprehensive, advanced level, textbook dealing with all aspects of gravity, written for the physicist in a contemporary style. The italicized adjectives in the above sentence are the key: most of the existing books on the market are either outdated in emphasis, too mathematical for a physicist, not comprehensive or written at an elementary level. (For example, the two unique books – L. D. Landau and E. M. Lifshitz, The Classical Theory of Fields, and C.W.Misner, K. S. Thorne and J. A. Wheeler (MTW), Gravitation – which I consider to be masterpieces in this subject are more than three decades old and are out of date in their emphasis.) The current book is expected to fill this niche and I hope it becomes a standard reference in this field. Some of the features of this book, including the summary of chapters, are given below.

As the title implies, this book covers both Foundations (Chapters 1–10) and Frontiers (Chapters 11–16) of general relativity so as to cater for the needs of different segments of readership. The Foundations acquaint the readers with the basics of general relativity while the topics in Frontiers allow one to ‘mix-andmatch’, depending on interest and inclination. This modular structure of the book will allow it to be adapted for different types of course work.

For a specialist researcher or a student of gravity, this book provides a comprehensive coverage of all the contemporary topics, some of which are discussed in a textbook for the first time, as far as I know. The cognoscenti will find that there is a fair amount of originality in the discussion (and in the Exercises) of even the conventional topics.