An Introduction to General Relativity and Cosmology

Experts Plebański and Krasiński provide a thorough introduction to the tools of general relativity and relativistic cosmology. Assuming familiarity with advanced calculus, classical mechanics, electrodynamics and special relativity, the text begins with a short course on differential geometry, taking a unique top-down approach. Starting with general manifolds on which only tensors are defined, the covariant derivative and affine connection are introduced before moving on to geodesics and cu...