As other reviewers have said, Taylor and Wheeler accomplish something marvelous (and by conventional wisdom impossible), making a non-trivial portion of general relativity accessible to physics undergraduates. But be warned that "accessible" does not mean easy! A good background in special relativity is essential, for example from the authors' earlier book Spacetime Physics. Beyond that, readers must be prepared for convoluted reasoning and heavy duty algebra in some parts of the book, covering the more esoteric optical effects of black holes and the effects of rotation. It was an effort for me to get through this book - but well worth it.

This book is different from every other introduction to general relativity I know. And better. The eminent authors connect geometry directly to physics, bypassing tensors. Curvature in space is detected by very simple length measurements; curvature in time, by the lengthening of periods of oscillations. There are nuggets in almost every page. I loved the demonstration that you don't really need coordinates to describe geometry: the shape of a boat is reconstructed entirely in terms of distances. Their dynamical principle is the maximum proper time principle. The way they derive energy and momentum from this principle is sterling physics. You'll learn a lot of general relativity in this book. Not all of it. But, learning to love it, you'll learn the advanced topics that cannot be treated this way by yourself, in other books. Perhaps in the huge Misner, Thorne, Wheeler.

I have not yet finished reading this book but my excitement over its brilliance forces me to comment. This book is shear magic in its ability to explain very difficult and strange phenomena in an intuitive and simple way. I have read the authors' book SpaceTime Physics as well as GR by Schutz and can do the tensors and all that; yet I am in awe of the ability these authors have of succeding at the near impossible. Using the study of black holes as the motivation for GR study is perfect. I love the choice of the variational principle to cut to the heart of the math. I recommend this book to anyone for self-study who has a smattering of calculus (not much is really needed). I am looking forward to studying Kip Thorne's membrane paradign book next. Gentlemen, kudos in the highest!

Patricia Rife has made a scientific subject meaningful in the comprehensible biography: "Lise Meitner and the Dawn of the Nuclear Age." This is a well researched and an acknowledgement of a woman's contribution to peace and medical technology. Lise Meitner devoted her life to research and was denied many Nobel Peace Prize awards because of her sex. This book is for every young woman, public library, high school library or anyone interested in an outstanding book of historic subjects. Special accolades to the author, Patricia Rife, for her professional treatment of this manuscript.

The interrelation of gravity and spacetime is a formidable subject to describe; the author does so with excellence. The diagrams and charts reinforce the understanding.

Unfortunately when a key subject left me rather clueless, (Boundary of a Boundary) I spent quite a few frustrated hours being uncertain on whether or not to continue reading without the support of the material on those pages. As it turned out, the subject became clearer once I read on and returned again. I never did grasp it as completely as the rest of the book.

The book contains the most enlightening description of transverse wave propagation I've ever seen. It also helps solidify one's understanding of interval and relativity.

Not a book to be read overnight.

This author is one of the most briliant, the most optimistic, and the most enthusiastic writer in all of physics, and in this book, his competence as a physicist and his deep fascination with the physical world is brought out dramatically. He is clearly a man who is feeling a powerful sense of exhiliration of the discoveries now taking place in all areas of knowledge. His foundation and his theme in the book is a simple geometric principle, namely that the boundary of a boundary is zero. He then guides the reader, assumed to have a rudimentary knowledge of mathematics, in a splendid presentation of the power of this principle in gravitational physics.

The first chapter is an overview of the history behind the subject, via the work of people who contributed to our current understanding of gravity. And then, with a masterfull use of diagrams he gives the reader a taste of the simplicity of the equivalence principle and the need to tack on an additional dimension (time) to the 3-dimensional space of everyday experience. The Pound-Rebka experiment is discussed as one that illustrates the idea of the spacetime interval, and the role of time dilation is discussed via the possibility of practical space travel. And such enthusiasm in his dialog: "the universe will grow ever more exciting", he says, and looking at the developments now taking place in today's science, he is indeed correct.

Chapter 4 gives a fascinating overview of what the author calls the boomerang, which illustrates the action of curvature on nearby test masses. This thought experiment involves the motion of a spacecraft through an imaginary tunnel through the Earth. The author analyzes the motion from the standpoint of Newtonian physics and general relativity. Curvature as the "grammar of gravity" is the topic of the next chapter, with illustrations of the paths of ants on spaces of zero, positive, and negative curvature. A very intuitive treatment of parallel transport around a closed path on a curved surface is given. The tides are discussed as a natural manifestation of the gravitational influence of the Moon on Earth.

Must difficult for a layman to understand is how spacetime acts on masive objects, but the author explains it brilliantly in the next chapter, taught via the concept of "momenergy". This entity is a 4-vector, and the author uses it to show how its creation in a spacetime region can be written as the sum of 8 terms, reflecting the fact that the "boundary" of a four-dimensional block in spacetime consists of eight three-dimensional cubes. That the contents of these cubes sum to zero is the famous "boundary of a boundary is zero", which is discussed in the next chapter. This chapter is one of the best explanations ever given (at this level) of the physics behind spacetime curvature and massive objects. The actual mathematical quantification of curvature is detailed in chapters 8 and 9, using elementary mathematics. The author discusses nicely the famous Scharwzschild geometry.

Concepts of a more concrete nature are discussed in chapter 10, wherein the author discusses the famous Pound-Rebka experiment and planetary motion. This is followed by a discussion of the elusive gravitational waves in chapter 11. Again with a clever use of illustrations, the author explains the transverse property of gravitational waves, and compares gravitational waves with electromagnetic waves. The role of the quadrupole moment in the creation of gravitational waves is brought out briliantly by the author. He discusses briefly various attempts to detect gravitational waves.

Black holes are the topic of chapter 12, wherein the famous Penrose process for extracting energy from a black hole is discussed, and the "no-hair" theorem for black holes. A neat symbolic representation of the Bekenstein number of a black hole is given. The role of the Hawking process, connection quantum processes with the physics of black holes is briefly discussed. The author ends the book with a look at the expansion of the universe, the missing mass problem, and another very interesting topic that has gained much attention recently: the concept of gravitomagnetism. This is a "weak-field" prediction of general relativity, and predicts that the rotation of the Earth should influence the motion of orbiting satellites. This topic is currently bringing together ideas such as the quantum Zeno effect, Mach's principle, and the notorious "frame dragging" effect in general relativity. Experiments do measure it are currently in play and in the proposal stage, namely the LAGEOS and LAGEOS II experiments, which measure the gravitomagnetic orbital perturbation, which is known as the Lense-Thirring effect.

This is truely an amazing book. Wheeler does for General Relativity what Hawking did for Cosmology in "A Brief History of Time", and in some sense they are similar books. However Wheeler has a unique, quirky style of writing that makes the book an entertaining adventure to read.

Wheeler is able to pull off a major accomplishment: He explains Einstein's General Relativity in a clear, straightforward manner, with a minimum of math. It's "conventional wisdom" that General Relativity is seriously serious stuff, the domain of hardcore Physics geeks. That doesn't faze Wheeler. He leads the reader along, gleefully pointing out the scenery, making it all look quite simple and understandable. And then all of a sudden, when you least expect it, you find he's derived and presented Einstein's field equations with only a teensy-tiny bit of algebra! Even if you know this stuff already, his presentation makes you think about it with a new perspective.

And did I mention the illustrations? They are really exceptional.

If you have any interest or dealings with GR, ya gotta have this book!

By size and content, this book ranks as one of the largest in physics . Not only does it give an excellent discussion of all of the concepts in gravitational physics, but it gives clear presentations of the relevant mathematics, not hesitating at all to employ useful diagrams and pictures. Truly a classic, it is a work that is sure to be read by future generations of students in gravitational physics. I can still remember the excitement I felt when picking the book up for the first time. The authors are giants in the field, and it is great that they chose to take the time to write such an excellent book. It is readily apparent that they care a great deal about what the reader will take away after reading such a large book, as the presentation is always crystal clear and a great joy to read.

Space prohibits a thorough review, so I will instead highlight the parts of the book that I found particularly exceptional: 1. The example of how coordinate singularities arise: the "cells of the egg crate" squashed to zero volume. 2. The beautiful illustration of the Roll-Krotkov-Dicke experiment. 3. The "physics demo" of a local inertial frame of reference (it is not very difficult to construct this demonstration for actual use in a classroom). 4. The presentation of a 2-form as a honeycomb of tubes with a sense of circulation. Such an explanation is lacking in the general mathematical literature. 5. The flying ring demonstration illustrating Faraday stresses. This demonstration is done very often in physics classes, and is simple to set up. 6. The excellent discussion (with illustrations) of the covariant derivative and the Schild ladder construction. 7. The presentation of parallel transport around a closed curve. 8. The treatment of Riemann normal coordinates. These are typically presented in a purely formal way in most texts on general relativity, ignoring their status as providing a local inertial frame in curved spacetime. 9. The (philosophical) discussion on the principal of general covariance in the context of Newtonian gravity in tensorial form. 10. The illustration, with accompanying discussion, on a situation where two events can be connected by more than one geodesic. The authors mention the relation of this example to the Morse theory of critical points. 11. The discussion of the Bianchi identities and the topological result on the boundary of a boundary being empty. 12. The discussion on the gravity gradiometer. 13. The exceptional discussion on six routes to the Einstein field equation. 14. The variational principle and the initial value problem in the Einstein equation. 15. The connection between the Gauss-Weingarten equations and extrinsic curvature. 16. The ADm formulation of the dynamics of geometry. 17. The discussion on Mach's principle. 18. The radial oscillations of a Newtonian star. 19. The Hamilton-Jacobi description of motion and its employment in analyzing the central force problem. 20. The effect of the value of the cosmological constant on cosmological models and evolution of the universe. 21. The cosmological redshift and its explanation via the expansion of the universe. 22. The mathematics of the Mixmaster cosmology. 23. The dynamics of the Schwarzschild geometry. 24. The discussion on the global properties of spacetime and singularity theorems. 25. The short biographies of Hawking and Penrose. 26. The quadrupole nature of gravitational radiation. 27. The experimental justification of general relativity, particularly the description of Pound-Rebka experiment on the gravitational redshift.

This volume is absolutely neccesary for any serious student of gravitational physics. Although their are sections suitable for an upper division undergrad, this is a tome for the graduate student in Physics. The mathematical expertise required for the advanced Track-2 portions of the book are predominently graduate level and above. However, it is those very sections where the exotic topics of black-hole thermodynamics and quantum cosmology are addressed in all their splendor. There are areas of interest to students of math such as the introduction of differential forms and tensor index-slinging. All students of Physics should have at least cracked the cover of this book once before they receive their B.Sci. This is a thorough if dated (1975) exposition that deserves a place along side Peeble's 'COSMOLOGY' and Dirac's 'QUANTUM MECHANICS' in a list of 'must have' volumes for any Physicist (even those far removed from general relativity). With the possible exception of S. Hawkings, Misner, Thorne and Wheeler show their collective expertise on GTR with rigor and style. Even the typsetting, diagrams and the liberal use of explanitory boxes all serve to give the work a feel of completion. It is no wonder that in the physics literature it is often cited simply as MTW.

The world would be less beautiful if this book didn't exist. What a remarkable feat! The sequence that leads from the very basic concept of spacetime to the computation of the components of Riemann tensor by using forms and the Cartan equations is unparalleled. A lot of mathematical formulas follow from simple reasoning and ... drawings! The introduction of Schild's ladder to motivate the axioms for a (torsionless) connection is very clever. The introduction of curvature by means of geodesic deviation is very intuitive. The derivation of the expression for the geodesic deviation (and, consequently, of the expression for the Riemann tensor) is, again, completely intuitive. The chapter on spinors is very beautiful and useful. Still, I would never recommend this book for a beginner. For it is absolutely non-linear. I have been told that this corresponds to the ideas of Wheeler's concerning learning. Sometimes an argument at chapter 4 (say) depends on something that is intr! oduced in chapter 8. Also, the three tracks (first, second and boxes)interfere all the time, requiring much discipline from the reader. If, however, you already learned the basics (for instance, in Landau, Lifshitz), so that you know what you are looking for, "Gravitation" is unbeatable, of a class apart. I've seen mathematicians adopting the language introduced by them to explain tensors: a slot for each argument of the multilinear machine! Last, not the least, the Index and the References are of the highest quality. This shows respect for the readers. Drs. Misner, Thorne and Wheeler are to be congratulated.

Want understand what Stephen Hawking and his colleagues are talking about, but have no idea about the history of cosmology? Then this is the book you're looking for.

This collection of texts taken from writings by Plato, Copernicus, Galilei, Ptolomy, Einstein, Hubble and other theorists discus what the universe is made of, how it works and (ultimately) what our place is in the Grand Scheme of Things, offering good insight into how our knowledge of the universe has developed over the last 40 centuries from Babylonian times to the 20th Century.

As this book was originally published in 1957 and reprinted in 1965, the latest theories are not included. It is therefore not a book for mathematicians or physicists interested in learning the latest theories, but rather a book for those interested in a well-written, general introduction to the field of cosmology.

July 7, 1999 I would like to take a minute to thank Audio Scholar for putting together this audio novel which consists of 4 essays on the theories of the Universe. I thoroughly enjoyed it as did my 17 month old son who gets to listen to them to as his bedtime stories. One night he kept me up until 2am until I turned the tape back on! Normally he just gets to listen from 8 - 10pm. I would like to encourage Audio Scholar to produce more of these types of edutainment audio programs on tape or CD. In many instances I wouldn't mind seeing the programs extend to 4 tapes or CD's. I love listening to scientific books on my way to work and also love to share them with my 17 month old son as his bedtime stories. My budget for this type of audio edutainment is $1,000 a year and the more science and physics books abridged the better. I would love to see the following subjects abrigded to audio for distribution through Amazon.com. Maths, sciences, physics, astrophysics, geology, any and all space related topics, gravity, unified field theory, electromagnetics, electronics, microproccessor design, optics, micro-optics, electro-optics, light and the theory there of, satellites, satellite orbital mechanics and related theory. I do not have time in my busy daily schedule to read very much, but do I have five hours a day to listen and learn. If you make it I will support it. Arnold D Veness

The physics is fine but this is an autobiography. What kind of a man is Wheeler? I got the impression he spent as much time avoiding offending anybody important as he did on physics. He sounds like an amiable sycophant.

Having noticed over the years that Prof. John Archibald Wheeler's name turns up in an amazing variety of physics-related articles and anecdotes, I was particularly primed to read his autobiography. The book doesn't follow a simple from-birth chronology, but rather begins with Wheeler teaching at Princeton and volunteering to meet the ship carrying his mentor, Niels Bohr, at a New York City dock in January of 1939. From that pivotal moment at the brink of World War II, Wheeler fills out his story by reaching back to childhood and forward to his long career in teaching, research, and national service. We learn of his brother Joe, whose body lay in a foxhole on an Italian hillside until it was reduced to bones. Wheeler reminds us that if the Manhattan Project had geared up one year earlier, the lives of his brother and many others might have been spared.

Wheeler's remarkable character pervades the book and helps make it unique and interesting. In a profession legendary for strong intellects and egos, he has achieved and maintained a pomposity coefficient of zero. His judgments of other people are unfailingly generous, but also astute enough to be interesting and revealing. He provides candid firsthand impressions of legendary figures such as Bohr, Einstein, Oppenheimer, Teller, Ulam, Heisenberg, Fermi, Szilard and Feynman . We also learn about many less well-known colleagues, friends and students whom he finds memorable for various reasons. In contrast to the eminent-scientist stereotype, Wheeler has always enjoyed teaching undergraduates and is genuinely interested in the problems and aspirations of the young people entrusted to his care.

Like the brilliant George Gamow, Wheeler has a talent for explaining difficult concepts and illustrating them with whimsically inventive diagrams. The book's autobiographical threads are interwoven with a rich tapestry of subtle but plainly-spoken physical insights on dozens of topics, some arcane enough to leave even the author slightly bemused. I believe anyone interested in physics will find a personal revelation or two among Wheeler's lucid, informal scientific explanations. There are touches of Gamowesque humor too, such as his theory that the fates somehow conspired to entangle him with a string of Hungarian emigres.

The title concepts of the book -- Geons, Black Holes and Quantum Foam -- were all named by Wheeler himself. He began his career at the minute scale of particle physics, moved on to the grand sweep of relativistic cosmology, and finally circled back to the hyperminuteness of quantum foam. Of course there is nothing really disjointed about such a journey, since connections among the nested scales of nature constitute one of the grand unifying themes of physics.

During his tenure at Princeton university, John Archibald Wheeler has served as the mentor to such outstanding physicists as Richard P. Feynman, Kip Thorne and Hugh Everett. He was also great friends with such individuals as Albert Einstein & Niels Bohr. In short, his contributions to physics have been indispensable.

This present work of his traces his life, a life that is (as the cover says) one of science. However, one of the nice facets of this book is that it goes beyond just the laboratory & reveals the personal life of this great man. We learn of the moving death of his brother in WWII, his worries and concerns over nuclear war (as well as the grapples with his conscience that he endured over the invention of the hydrogen bomb) and many other aspects of his life. He also tells stories of some of his most memorable students; not all of these were necessarily his most gifted pupils. Above all, Wheeler reveals a genuine human passion that has characterized his approach to science over the greater part of this century. One of the best biographies of a scientist I have ever read.

I have only the first edition, however, the fundamental concepts of invariance of the (space-time) interval and the curvature of spacetime defining gravitation are presented in an intuitive way (other comments notwithstanding). This book, followed by Gravitation and Gravitation and Inertia all co-authored by John Archibald Wheeler (Princeton Univ), constitute a classic trilogy in gravitation, relativity, physics, and methods of thinking. If you think this book is a baby book, pick up one of the other two. If you think it's too hard you need to do some elemental studying. If you think this book fails to make these concepts intuitive, you haven't understood it. It is not intended for those who don't like to reason nor for those who dislike math. Between this book and the other two should lie several courses in calculus, ordinary and partial differential equations, differential forms, and possibly a lower level differential geometry course. As Feynman would say, "this is how the world works".

This is one of the best Physics books I've read. I've read several relativity books, and this is by far the clearest. There is little math--some, but not much. However, the challenge of learning(and teaching) introductory relativity should not lie in the math but in the concepts. This book explains those concepts in a clear way.

Another thing I like about this book is that it projects an enthusiasm for the subject that few textbooks do. The authors of this book are not afraid to have a little fun with physics while also learning, something lesser authors are afraid to do. They also portray the beauty in Relativity--especially the beauty of the unity of space and time and the unity of matter and energy.

Yes, at points the book is unconventional, some might even say silly. But when was it decreed that physicists cannot have fun? The unconventional parts enhance, rather than detract from, clarity. Apparent paradoxes become clear, common pitfalls are pointed out nicely--it's a great book for anyone curious about what it means to say that space and time are unified, two aspects of a single entity we call Spacetime.

I used this book to begin my mathematical study of Relativity (and am now working my way through the author's next book, Exploring Black Holes). This book is an excellent introduction into the field from a mathematical perspective, with an excellent presentation, interesting problem sets, and solutions for the odd numbered problems in the back (which is great for learning on your own). The prose is highly readable, and uses very accessible terminology to help the reader understand "what is really going on."

In its course, Taylor and Wheeler present over a dozen "paradoxes" relating to Special Relativity. Several of these appear in the main text, while the remainder appear as problems. I believe my intuition is lacking because I was unable to get the right answer for the paradox problems without working through the math first - although this intuition may come only with further experience. I would have been happy if the authors had included a few more paradox problems with solutions from an "intuition" perspective (as well as a mathematical solutions) to help gain this intuition.

The mathematics throughout the book is nothing harder than algebra and the occasional trigonometry, so it should well be accessible to anyone with a high-school calculus understanding of math. One mathematical trick the authors introduce in their next book would be helpful for this one as well: when solving for a number which is only slightly less than one, (as in several of the problems with particles moving near light speed) instead of trying to solve for .9999999999992343, which would be rounded to 1 by most calculators, solve for "1 - X" instead.

Scattered copiously throughout the book are solved sample problems which guide the reader through the easier problems, as well as "boxes" which discuss interesting ramifications and related material. The more involved problems often include step by step instructions on how to reach a solution which would otherwise be by no means obvious at first glance (at least, not to me). Many problems deal with actual experiments performed to test and validate relativity.

In sum, I cannot find any substantial problems with this book. It is clear, concise, battle-tested (having been originally published over thirty years ago), and an excellent formal introduction into the pardoxical world of Special Relativity. One author maintains a web site at http://www.eftaylor.com/ with, among other material, an interesting article on the writing of this book and his collaboration with John Wheeler.

The interested reader can find a history of the development of Special and General Relativity in Kip Thorne's Black Holes and Time Warps.

PS: Professor Taylor confirms that the answer to sample problem 8-17b in the seventh printing (which I have) is off by a factor of 1000.

John A. Wheeler is not only of the world's leading physicists but he is a great teacher. Besides writing an excellent popular introduction to Relativity theory "Gravity And Spacetime" he is co-writer of the most popular academic work on General Relativity "Gravitation" and also of a superb textbook introducing undergraduates to Special Relativity "Spacetime Physics". Both Professor's Wheeler popular works and text books are clear, user friendly expositions of Relativity Theory. So it was with great anticipation that I started Wheeler's collections of essays "At Home In The Universe".

Unfortunately many of the essays are directed at the professional scientist and are beyond the level of even the well read amateur. Reading some of Professor Wheeler's discussions of the philosophy of science is like being thrown into a discussion being conducted by people who have known each other for a very long time and have developed a special language. For instance, "With a slight rewording of Bohr's formulation, we say, 'The use of certain concepts in the description of nature automatically excludes the use of other concepts, which however, in another connection are equally necessary for the description of the phenomenon.'"

There are some gems in this book, though. John A. Wheeler seems to have personally known every great scientist of the Twentieth Century: Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Richard Feynman, Andrei Sakharov, Kurt Godel, John von Neumann, Steven Weinberg. His comments on them and their work are invaluable.

Wheeler also has some interesting comments on the risks of a nuclear energy. One does not need to accept his optimistic viewpoint in order to appreciate his insight.

"At Home In The Universe" is really two books: one for the professional scientist and another for the general public. If the volume was separated, we would have two excellent books instead of a single disappointing one.

John Archibald Wheeler is one of the landmark physicists of the 20th century. He has served as mentor to Richard Feynman, Kip Thorne and Hugh Everett (among others). He made significant contributions on the production of the A-bomb in WWII and also headed up the US efforts to make the H-bomb post WWII. He is, in a word, one of the most under-rated scientists of the current epoch.

In the present book, he spends most of his pages paying homage to people who dedicated their lives to science over the centuries. Such venerable names as Nicolaus Copernicus, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Hideki Yukawa, Maria Sklodowska Curie, Hermann Weyl and others form the objects of Wheeler's praise. Much of the book is made up of snippets of terse speeches which Wheeler has made at various symposiums and celebrations during his lengthy sojourn at Princeton. For example, there is a brief poem which he wrote for Joseph Henry which is included, as well as an oration on the "colleagueship at Princeton" which he delivered in 1966.

Interspersed throughout the book are essays which Wheeler has written on quantum mechanics, black holes, cosmology & the like. These are not the easiest pieces to read; I would suggest that readers browse through some preliminary books on QM before attempting to read Wheeler ("Taking The Quantum Leap" by Fred Alan Wolf might be a good place to start). The essays are well written & Wheeler uses some helpful analogies, but the going is still pretty rough. One of Wheeler's quotes which I really like (not from this book, though) is "If you haven't found something strange during the day, it hasn't been much of a day." One is sure to find many-a-strange scientific phenomenom in this book.

This book lacks a central, cohesive theme & the order in which it was put together does not follow any specific chronology or format. However, I don't think this takes away from the book's superb picture of what one of the premiere scientists of the 20th century spends his days thinking about. There are several passages in which he compares and contrasts science with philosophy as well as with the pragmatism of everyday existence. I would recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in John Archibald Wheeler, physics, or the scientific community of Princeton university. Make yourself at home....

I purchased my copy used (20$) and (after my initial delight at the bargain) was disappointed. I had hoped for a more technical intermediate-level expansion of Wheeler's intriguing but vague "Journey into Gravity and Spacetime." This book is instead largely a hodge-podge of specialty articles of interest only to advanced professionals in the field. Unless you have money to burn, invest it in another text, like "Gravitation," by Thorne, Wheeler, etc., which isn't great but is useful.

This book tought me a lot about the physics of gravitation and inerti