This page contains information and resources for both editions of A Student's Manual for A First Course in General Relativity. The forthcoming second edition accompanies the third edition of Bernard Schutz's A First Course in General Relativity. The first-edition material is retained below as an archive for readers using Schutz's second edition.
Second Edition
The forthcoming second edition of A Student's Manual for A First Course in General Relativity accompanies the third edition of Bernard Schutz's A First Course in General Relativity.
The new edition provides step-by-step guidance through more than 200 selected exercises, with detailed solutions and explanatory comments cross-referenced to the relevant equations and sections in Schutz's text. It also includes 168 supplementary problems designed to highlight conceptual challenges and direct readers to useful supporting literature.
The book includes a comprehensive index with corresponding keywords boldfaced in the main text (to fascilitate navigation), as well as an appendix of useful mathematical and physical results, making it useful both as a study guide and as a lasting reference for advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, instructors, researchers and self-directed learners.
Publisher's page for the second edition
What's new in the second edition?
- Revised to accompany the third edition of Schutz's textbook.
- New material supporting Schutz's chapter on gravitational wave astronomy.
- Substantial updates to the later applications chapters.
- Solutions to about half of the new exercises in Schutz's third edition.
- New hints and supplementary problems in most chapters.
- Improvements to many of the solutions in the earlier chapters.
- A new Mathematica notebook replacing the older Maple worksheet.
- Use of boldface keywords to help readers scan for indexed terms.
- Correction of terminology from “Lorentz gauge” to “Lorenz gauge.”
Second Edition Resources
The following resources support the second edition and Schutz's third edition.
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Mathematica notebook
A Wolfram Mathematica notebook supporting the second edition. -
Table of Exercises
A pdf file with a table with columns describing, for each exercise, its subject area, its objective, the difficulty (my very subjective opinion), whether the solution is in the Student Manual or the Instructors manuals or neither, and finally its "status" relative to the first edition -- new, unchanged, updated, minor changes, major improvements etc. -
Cambridge online resources
Additional online resources for the second edition.
Errata: Second Edition
I no longer have access to the second-edition because it's in the hands of CUP. In the edition I sent them, I found errors that I describe in the table below.
If you find an error in the second edition, please check this page first. If the error is not listed, please send a correction to Gab8piTab@gmail.com.
| Exercise | Location | Correction | Thanks to |
|---|---|---|---|
| Supplementary Problem 2.6 | Statement of problem: "Plot a diagram to determine the maximum angle of no Doppler shift?" | Replace that question with the instruction: "Plot a diagram of velocity vs. angle of no Doppler shift." | Author (Rob Scott) |
| Exercise 4.24(a) | Statement of problem: "The stars sits at the origin." | Drop the "s" on "stars"; there is only one star. | Author (Rob Scott) |
| Statement of Supplementary Problem 6.8 | eqn. (6.130) | Insert a minus sign on the RHS of eqn. (6.130) | Author (Rob Scott) |
| Solution of Supplementary Problem 6.9 | reference to SP3.15 | Should be SP6.15 | Author (Rob Scott) |
| Statement of Supplementary Problem 7.10 | line element, eqn.~(7.81), is missing dr^2 term | add dr^2 to RHS of eqn.~(7.81) | Author (Rob Scott) |
| Statement of Supplementary Problem 8.4 | derive Schutz Eq.(3.35) | I meant derive Schutz Eq.(8.35) | Author (Rob Scott) |
| Statement of Supplementary Problem 8.8 | eqn. (8.104) | please apply absolute value on the right-hand side | Author (Rob Scott) |
First Edition Archive
The first edition of A Student's Manual for A First Course in General Relativity was published in 2016 and accompanies the second edition of Bernard Schutz's textbook. These files are retained for readers and instructors still using that edition.
The first edition provides detailed solutions to many of Schutz's exercises, together with supplementary problems and references to other mathematics and physics texts.
First Edition Resources
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Maple worksheet
This worksheet supports the first edition. It is retained for archival use and is no longer actively supported.
Errata: First Edition
I am grateful to readers who have identified errors. If you find an error not listed here, please contact me at Gab8piTab@gmail.com.
| Exercise | Location | Correction | Thanks to |
|---|---|---|---|
| Statement of Supplementary Problem 6.8 | All terms in eqn. (6.127) and eqn. (6.128) | Remove the initial minus sign in all four terms of eqn. (6.127), insert a minus sign on the RHS of eqn. (6.128) | Author (Rob Scott) |
| Solution to Exercise 10.17 | Numerical routine for rho in the Maple worksheet | Changed power from 4/3 to 3/4. | Shafayat Shawqi |
| Solution to Exercise 12.13 | First equation, first line | The second term should be +, not −. | Alon Brook-Ray |
| Section B.4.2, Static spherically symmetric spacetimes | All 4 terms in eqn.(B.19) | Remove the initial minus sign in every term | Author (Rob Scott) |
Contact
For errata, questions, or comments, please contact Gab8piTab@gmail.com.